This Is the Night (4 page)

Lance and Lorrie had no possessions, but the city was well stocked with furnished apartments. “Registry-runners,” the disgusted landlord told them at the first place they saw. “The last boys just up and left. Two more upstairs I’m keeping an eye on. You can’t always spot the weak ones.”

Lance and Lorrie nodded.

“Overall, it’s a good building,” the landlord continued. “Six units total. Some immigrants from Neutral Country P right across the hall. Bad smells, but great cooking. In that other unit, a friendly asthmatic gal. Her husband was a hero. We’ve got good people here.”

“We’ll take it,” Lance said.

“A good omen, taking the place today.”

“What’s today?”

“Don’t you two read the papers? Today’s a day for celebrating.”

From the side of his vision, Lance watched as Lorrie made a rapid attempt to rebuild her face, quickly working to disinherit the scowl that had appeared the moment the words left the man’s mouth.

The landlord seemed to take the masked looks in front of him as close emotional bonds and continued to speak. “That’s right. Just last night our boys took back a nice little chunk of the jungle. Sure, we lost a few, but those cold-blooded Ideology Five fanatics, may the Young Savior curse their name, lost even more.”

“Seven hundred casualties,” Lorrie mumbled, “is not ‘a few.’”

Lance elbowed her, and the two of them shook hands with the landlord. He had no idea whether the number of dead referred to citizens of the Homeland, Foreign, or both. A feeling of relief passed over him that he didn’t read the newspapers.

Inside the apartment were pots and pans and even a pair of jeans that Lance found fit him quite well. The two of them slipped right into those other people’s lives. Lorrie put up a new pair of curtains and slowly began to toss out the old occupants’ things and replace them with their own. Lance wanted her with him at all times.

2.

Outside, the air was warm; the deep-red sun burned hot and luminous. Joe and Benny were both broke, but their empty pockets were the least of their problems. They could hear the landlord on the stairs, showing the empty apartment below. Both knew that come Monday, they would have nothing to offer to the wiry old man with the harsh teeth and pale scalp when he tapped on their door to collect. Their imaginations had been stunted, and Joe and Benny had censored their thoughts away from what they were sure was unthinkable. Now they had nowhere to live and much bigger worries. The Registry had found them.

“The girl sounds hot,” Benny whispered.

The two of them sat on their old couch, doing their best to limit all sounds of life.

“Be quiet,” said Joe. “I think he’s showing the place to two girls.”

“Yeah, and one of them sounds hot.”

“You know that ‘sounds hot’ is a stupid concept, right?”

Benny shrugged. Insofar as Joe was concerned, a Benny shrug was a concession to the rightness of his own point. They waited for the landlord’s footsteps outside their door, for the terrible knock, but when they heard him mention heading out for lunch, the two of them began stuffing clothes into bags. They would take only what they could carry.

“So we’ll meet on Friday, right?” Joe said.

“Right,” said Benny. “At the Blue Unicorn.”

Joe felt a serious terror when they parted because he knew their carefree times were gone. Not that their time together had always been so great; the fear came because Joe had no idea what kind of life might replace it.

Benny headed out first, his cracked leather bag slung across his shoulder.

First, the familiar sounds of Benny’s hard footsteps, clunking down the stairs. But then a pause, the chiming voice of what could only be one of the neighbors. Joe had seen the guy and his girlfriend around for a few days now, and had even run into them a few times in a coffee shop, but with each encounter, he had made sure to be as bland and quick as possible.
Destroy all references,
the saying went. Leave no images behind. He overheard that the couple had moved to Western City North from elsewhere, that the guy was some sort of artist, and that the girl was interested in hosting political meetings for some cause or another, but that was it.

Pressing his ear against the glazed glass of the doorway, he heard Benny and the male neighbor exchange greetings. Benny was careless like that. Had Joe encountered someone on the stairs, he would have lowered his eyes and mumbled a soft greeting without breaking his stride. But Benny wasn’t the type who might stop and think that for anyone with an exacting eye, a living, breathing young man with a well-stocked bag around his shoulder was unlikely to return to wherever he was departing from.

Through the door, Joe heard the guy introduce himself to Benny.
Lance
. Just another name, just another roadblock. He squeezed his eyes shut and willed Benny the smarts to give a fake name back. He did, and Joe let out a long breath he did not realize he had been holding. Why make it any easier for the Point Line than he had to? Whoever this Lance was, Joe wished he would head back indoors. He too had a bag to carry out, a life to leave behind.

Joe caught a ride across the bridge to a student co-op in a small college town. The next two nights he spent in a wall closet, a pile of clothes stuffed into a pillowcase under his head. That night, he dreamed of a soundless Benny, gesturing to him wildly, unable to speak, further details slipping away the moment he woke. On Friday, as planned, Joe went back to the Blue Unicorn and waited for Benny to show.

As Joe sat in the café, an emptiness skidded across his stomach, and he sneaked small bites of forgotten food when no one was looking: stale bread, hard cheese, salted beef. A full day of waiting, and still no Benny. Normally, Joe liked to be alone, needed it even. Most people drained him or filled him with a profound sadness that human interaction was, by definition, such a chore. But not Benny. Around Benny, his gloom was swept away. Benny recharged him.

After hours of waiting, Joe hitchhiked back across the bridge to the co-op. It was an old building with an apexed roof that dropped shingles onto the front yard at menacing speeds. Inside, the hallways were lined with paint streaks and posters offering discredited or fanciful explanations of official versions of events. Every door was closed, but from behind each one escaped loud, thudding music, the scratches and wobbles of banged instruments shifting at an ever-changing tempo. These days in the Homeland, there were only two types of music: clanging songs of war or the sad, slow tones of women who wept alone.

There were so many people in and out of the co-op that no one gave Joe any trouble. Women and vets, for the most part, a few of them Substance dealers, none of them with any idea of who was lost and wandering and who actually belonged. A few of the dealers had approached him, but Joe turned them down. He knew Benny messed around with Substance Q occasionally, but it was clear that these folks were slinging new derivatives that were much more extreme.

That evening, Joe called his parents collect. He knew they would want to hear from him, and besides, maybe they had some information he could use. His mother yelped when she heard him on the end of the line.

“Calm down, Ma,” Joe said.

“Where are you?” His mother always began conversations like this.

He told her he was at a co-op for college kids, and she began to cry. “Are you going to church?” his mother sniffed. “Tell me you go. I do hope you’re going, Joe. I really do.”

A bone-thin man without a shirt walked by and blinked his eyes in Joe’s direction a few too many times. Joe let his eyes pass over the man’s thin limbs and sunken chest, noting his missing ear and scarred torso. “Look, Ma, this is collect. Don’t you want to call me back?”

A debate broke out between his mother and father over which was more expensive: a collect call or a long distance one. After a few moments of letting them argue, he shouted the co-op’s number over their voices and hung up. The shirtless man walked past again. A small gust of desire drifted into Joe’s chest, but he stamped it out quickly. There were no friendly faces in this strange place. Besides, the man in front of him had some sort of problem.

“What?” Joe asked the man.

With a slim finger, the man pointed to the phone.

“I’m waiting for a call,” Joe said.

The man’s face got tight, but he kept quiet. He took a cross-legged seat on the floor, folded up at Joe’s feet. Eyes closed and breaths slow and troubled, the man seemed to be shutting out all external stimuli. Finally the phone rang again, Joe’s parents already midargument the moment he picked up. His father’s hearing had begun to fade; each word was initiated with an excess of volume. He heard his father grunt something to his mother about
telling him now
. Not yet, the pitted voice of his mother said. Whatever his father thought he should know was put on hold; she had more to ask him: Where are you, how are you doing, and what is it that you think you are doing wherever you are?

Well, Joe thought about telling them, there’s a one-eared cross-legged man with piped veins and heavy breaths folded at my feet. “It’s my turn now,” he heard his father say. An involuntary clutch pressed into Joe’s back and thrust his spine straight. Even though it had been two years since Joe had been under his roof, the voice of his father still whipped his skin; each sound he spoke birthed tiny welts in the center of Joe’s chest.

“They came in person, Joe. The Registry. Showed up at our door at dinnertime.”

Joe said nothing. The cross-legged man lifted his head and looked up at him. As their eyes met, the man unfurled his palm to reveal a fiery flash of red. It was a crumpled peony; Joe recognized the flower from his mother’s garden. What he meant by it, Joe had no idea.

“‘Three notices,’ they said. Three notices you ignored. Scared the heck out of your mother.”

“Tell her I’m sorry about that.” Below him, the bright red petals of the peony lay flat on the cross-legged man’s upturned palm. Maybe he was one of those vets Joe had heard about: stable on the surface, but saddled with an inner world of deluded landscapes and bristling misconceptions. Unless the flower was some sort of signal. But Joe’s father was still talking: notices ignored, official documents, last chances.

“You can’t ignore the Registry, Joe.”

For once, his father was right. So many years into the war, the Homeland was getting desperate and the Registry more vicious.

Joe’s eyes needed to rest themselves on something that wasn’t unfolding into madness. Tacked on the wall in front of him was a piece of newsprint with the headline
Secret Reggies
, followed by small photographs of half a dozen men. Joe squinted at the tacked-up newsprint to try and make out what and who they were.

“It’s not a game, Joe,” his father was saying. “Twenty-two years now, these guys know what they’re doing, how to get you.”

Below the bolded
Secret Reggies
was a small, italicized explanation:
A Gallery of Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.
Undercover Registry agents, the article explained, posing as wildhairs, as normal citizens, as drug dealers and criminals. The agents, the article said, were everywhere. The largest photograph was of a man said to be operating locally. He had sloped shoulders and curly hair and wore a fringed vest.

Joe stared at the pictures.

None of those men
, he thought,
look any different from me.

“You know what they told me?” his father was saying. “They said, ‘tell your boy that even if he’s too chickenshit, that’s not how you go about it. Tell him you don’t ignore.’”

“Got it.” You used to be able to ignore, Joe thought. But no, the Homeland had been fighting for long enough that no one was slipping through.

“You go, you cough, you let them grab your balls, and then you see what happens.”

“Is that them saying that or you?”

“Does it matter?”

The cross-legged man rose to his feet.
We’re the same height; our eyes are completely level,
Joe thought. The two of them pushed their stares toward one another, and Joe could tell from the shrunken pupils across from him that this man had a raw edge that was ten worlds away from him. Were they done playing make-believe? Just as Joe was about to point to a spare closet he had seen with a lock on the door, the man leaned forward.

“History is a nightmare,” he whispered in Joe’s ear.

“What’s that? Speak up, Joe, I can’t hear you,” yelled his father into the phone. “I can’t make out a word you’re saying.”

All the signs had been wrong. Perhaps Joe was still too new at playing the game; he had let his eyes linger too long on the man’s childish limbs, his corduroyed thighs. Too much enthusiasm drizzling and oozing out of him like a lost puppy. The man let out a high-pitched sneeze and dragged the outer bone of his wrist across his nose before strangling Joe with his eyes one last time. After that, he was gone, down the hall to some other part of the dilapidated co-op. Even so, Joe allowed himself a smile. One day, he promised himself, he would get it right.

“So get this down, Joe,” his father was saying. “You’re up on First Tuesday, six p.m. Today is Friday, so that means you have four days to get yourself together. The induction center is at Fourteenth and a street called Clay. You got that?” his father said.

“Got it.”

“You have to go to this one, Joe. You really do.”

“Ask him about church again,” he heard his mother say.

“Your mother wants me to ask you about church,” said his father. A few hard-to-parse mutters and his mother’s voice came on the line. “You have to soak yourself, Joe, or it will all fall apart. Get drenched in the Young Savior now, understand?”

She had, Joe knew, no idea what she was talking about. How could she? His mother wasn’t in
Western City North. Up here, Joe had seen people who were soaked, drowning, really. Get soaked. A good chunk of the people in Western City North were so soaked in the Young Savior that their lungs were plugged and their hearts were suffocating. Every day in Western City North someone heard the Young Savior’s voice and put a bullet in their own heads or someone else’s. Whole quadrants of the city constantly wished to be elsewhere. But Western City North was the edge of the Homeland. This was the farthest they could go.

“You do understand what I mean when I say ‘soaked,’ don’t you, Joe?”

What did she know about being soaked? She meant the white-haired minister at their church who raised his voice ever so slightly when a passage struck him as illuminating a fundamental truth. She meant the brief tingle on her neck when the vocal lines of the congregants congealed in harmony on “Oh, the Burden Faced Down by My Bleeding Young Savior.” But she certainly did not understand what it was to be soaked in Western City North. His mother lived in Prison Complex J, an empty prairie of convicts and the people who kept them in.

“Yes, Mother,” Joe said.

“Soaked!” she repeated triumphantly.

He could not help but roll his eyes into the phone. Immediately the Young Savior’s voice entered his head to chastise him:
Do not remove thyself from the earthly wisdom of thy family.
Quotes from the Young Savior had a knack for burrowing into his mind at the most annoying times. Too much damn religious school.