This Is the Night (10 page)

“Can we talk in the kitchen?” Lorrie turned to him.

What the hell was it now? The two of them headed to the kitchen.

“Kick these people out soon,” she whispered. “WIT has an important meeting in the morning.”

Lance smiled and reminded himself not to bring up yet again what a terrible acronym WIT was, as it left off the second
W
of the workforce entirely. He almost told her to relax, but he quickly caught himself.
Relax?
she would say. He knew that she would tell him that this was not a year for relaxation and that next year wouldn’t be, either.

Once the letters started coming, they didn’t stop. Back home, Lance’s Registry board wanted him to drop in for a physical and was now sending sour ultimatums to his mother demanding he show his face. Ridiculous. Even if Lance had wanted to, he didn’t have the Currencies to make his way back to his hometown. He made a note to himself to write the Registry and explain that he had moved on, that he was in Western Sector now, and that they should update their records.
Also,
he might write,
please stop sending letters to my mother’s house. She is still in grief at the unique disappointments provided by the deaths of her favorite sons and the unending questions regarding her absent husband. Leave her alone. We barely talk anymore. Best, Lance Sheets, new resident, Western City North
.

Instead, Lance never got around to asking them to update their records, and his mother, he imagined, must have allowed the increasingly frantic missives to pile up on the inbuilt ledge of her hallway. Lance had no idea whether she understood what they were and where he was. Probably, she thought he had just missed church for a chunk of time. Every few weeks one of his brothers’ widows would come around and see an official-looking letter with his name on it, shake the dust off, and send it his way. By the time they made it out to Western City North, the Registry had already sent a newer, angrier version.

One night, after Lorrie insisted on sending yet another handful of Currencies to the hot wash, Lance struck her. He was not hitting Lorrie, he told himself, but forcing the lice to come pouring out of her in order to return her to him. Lorrie no longer seemed to like her body, and Lance thought he could hate it, too.

Once Lance had crossed the sick threshold of striking the first blow, a thought emerged: each whack to the side of her head would spill the bugs out of her. She was too beautiful, Lance raged, for these lice, for these community meetings where pastors and cops yelled and shouted, too beautiful for the wars that were happening and the wars that had been. Too beautiful, his sharp blood screamed, for all the sick events unfolding in and around her.

Later, the bruises mingled with the open sores of her scratches until it was impossible to tell the difference. So concentrated was Lorrie on the infestation and Women in the Workforce
that they never talked about the night of violence that had opened up between them. She had not threatened to leave. Eyeing his latest letter from the Registry, Lance thought, it suddenly seemed much more likely that it was he who would be leaving instead.

Her mother and father showed up at his apartment door, curled their noses at the Neutral Country P smells that lingered in the hallway, and cultivated their worry in an approach that Lance was sure would swallow Lorrie’s final threads of sanity.

“Welcome to Western City North,” Lance greeted them. “The edge of the Homeland.”

“Right,” said her father. He ignored Lance’s hand and brushed past him into the apartment.

“Hmmmph,” they said. “Tsssk,” their tongues went, the heavy air whistling through their scaly teeth. “Bugs!” they exclaimed to one another at random moments when Lorrie was out of earshot. “Under her skin!” Neither of them seemed to care what they said in front of Lance.

Cures and true bed rest, the parents said, could only come from Interior City lakes and the undirected friendliness of the people who made honest lives around their banks. The Western City North winters—sea-sprayed with bursts of sunshine—made the parents suspicious. The inhabitants of this city, they seemed to think, were barely citizens of the Homeland at all. “So dirty!” they said of the streets. “So dangerous!” they said of the latest attacks.

“But we never go to that part of the city,” Lance tried to explain.

“Of course not,” her mother said. “It’s much too dangerous.”

Each minor victory of the parents toppled Lance’s will and sapped his strength to argue against any outcome that was not identical to theirs. The father tuned into hawkish radio stations that Lance had not known existed, the voices from the speakers demanding a surge in troops for the upcoming twenty-third anniversary of war. A day in and it was clear to Lance that they had their differences; a few more and it was plain that the parents had no interest in looking beyond them. They would not stop, he saw, until he was wiped out, erased completely from their daughter’s life.

Lance smoked Substance Q and plotted. He would not let them win. He took long walks. More letters came from the Registry.
We demand, we urge,
the letters said. Each was filled with more spite than the one before. No workable plots came to him. No self-defense seemed adequate. Questions asked of him in his own house were mandates poorly disguised.

“How about you take another walk, dear?” Lorrie’s mother said. “We’d like some time with our daughter.” She was slicing crosswise into a fresh tomato, an item Lance had not seen in stores for months. He wondered where she had gotten it.

Another letter from the Registry had just arrived, fingers waggling and warning him of high Currency fines he knew he would never earn over a whole lifetime, along with years of imprisonment. Lance was soon to be in violation of many laws with numbers, letters, and decimal points. A walk around the block, he decided, would help him think about those numbers and about ways to get Lorrie’s parents out of his apartment and back to Interior City.

The departure was executed quickly and efficiently. They must have planned it for days.

At first, Lance thought Lorrie and her parents might have just headed out on some collective errand. He sat on the couch, smoked a Q cigarette, and listened to the roaring wind batter the old apartment windows. After a while he put on an album, humming along until the songs dissolved into a series of staggered snare beats. Only after several hours on the couch did Lance notice the note, a small piece of paper folded in thirds, resting on the table, his name printed on its middle section.

DON’T GO TO WAR. DON’T COME FIND ME.

Lance was driven by everything the letter didn’t say. There was no doubt Lorrie had written it, but what had she actually meant? The first part, Lance recognized, was pure Lorrie. Of course she didn’t want him going off to the jungle. But the second part—he looked to her block letters as partial evidence—was so emptied of emotion that it had clearly been conjured while under a parental spell.

What complete shit. From his sunken seat on the couch, he remembered where he had hidden two more Q cigarettes. He stood up, pulled them out of their hiding place, and began to smoke. She didn’t mean it. She couldn’t. He picked up the paper, the block letters disembodied, nothing like her familiar script. Crumpling the paper into a tiny ball, he tossed it as hard as he could. The small paper sphere bounced off the wall and onto the floor. Pulling the Q to his lips, Lance took a long, heavy drag.

He found it impossible to forget that he and Lorrie had lived in paradise, that before the bugs came they had had a near-perfect life of fresh food and steamy bedroom tricks, and now, he thought, some mortal error, some fat sin, had banished him into a sexless, smoky apartment with clean sheets, yellowing stacks of anguished political flyers cratering the floors, and a kitchen of canned beans and hard bread. And then there was the matter of money. Lance did odd jobs, enough to make his half of the rent, but he knew he couldn’t pay the whole thing for any real amount of time.

Lance looked around, started paying attention, and saw that while the lice had been feeding off of Lorrie, it was he who had returned from a walk to find his entire existence had been chewed away.

A few more drags of Q, and the veil over his situation withdrew. Nothing was fucked. Lorrie was gone for now, sure. But only by struggling with the present can one control the future. He would set off to find her.

One day passed, and then another. Clean sheets became dirty ones. Each morning when Lance awoke, he promised himself that today would be the day he would take to the road in search of her. And each evening, as he went to bed alone or with someone else, the sudden violence of her departure unsettled him.

She did not want to be where she was, that much he knew. Granted, he hadn’t left to find her yet. But, he reminded himself, not having left didn’t mean never leaving.

Without her, his work changed. Dark, hovering shapes and obscure symbols became bright and clear portrayals with clear and obvious correspondences. In the evenings, he would close his eyes and concentrate on her face, his mind graphing whatever part of her came to him. Each night, he would sketch a new feature, the folds and creases of her lips, the dark shade of the gap between her teeth. Never did he feel the need to combine them. Each page of the notebook contained a different part of her.