This Is the Night (20 page)

“What the fuck?” said Eric.

Susan released her grip. As the radio crashed to the floor, an explosion of parts scattered on the stained tiles below. Susan turned the corner, walked through the lobby, and stomped out of the double glass doors.

“Whoa,” said Doug. His pupils had expanded ferociously, the dark circles dull and flat.

“What’s the deal?” said the scratchy-voiced counselor.

“She’ll be back,” said Eric, his round head shaking. “Some people.”

“That was a good radio,” another voice said.

“Crazy bitch,” said Doug.

Everyone laughed, and Lorrie heard herself joining in. The sound of failure.

As the counselors shuffled away, Lorrie went and got a broom and a dustpan. There was no way anyone could fix that radio, so she just tossed the smallest parts into the trash. Most of the insides had fallen out, so she left the husk to rest in the corner where it wouldn’t bother anyone. Her stomach told her it was lunchtime, but Lorrie knew there would be a line of men in front of the Center, all of them with no idea what to do next. Was anything in this place helping those men?

She tried to push the question away, but some part of her knew that if a question was worth asking in the first place and no answer came, wasn’t it worth it to ask again?

16.

The dance is tonight. Not one girl from the sister school has agreed to go with Alan, but then again, he had not managed to ask anyone, either. He reminds himself that people who have not challenged themselves should not be disappointed when their goals stay unmet. Nonetheless, he is.

Tomorrow, all fourth-years will receive their assignments from the Registry. The boys will hold their sealed envelopes up to the light, a few of them drunk from some homemade cider they have saved for just this occasion, their eyes squinting in the shafts of sunlight, all hoping that they are the ones offered a job as a cook or driver. But that day has not yet come. For there is still tonight. And tonight is a dance. And at a dance, anything can happen.

Months ago, the boys filled out their forms. For those in Majority Group, Alan has read, the Registry form is a paper of possibilities. Maybe you’ll be lucky, the form says to these boys, maybe you won’t have to fight. But the pamphlets have spoken to him, and now he knows: for Homeland Indigenous, for graduates of the School, the form is different, not a matter of
if
, but instead a circling shark, hungry and biding its time, sure to strike just as soon as it’s ready.

From his bed, Alan had watched as Gad’s pen attacked the thicket of printed boxes. Weight. Height. Few of the questions on the paper left room for possibility. And then Gad paused.
Name and Address of Person Who Will Always Know Your Address.

Gad had looked at Alan. A slight nod.

Both of them knew then what they know even better now: the real is getting closer.

Priests and nuns roam through the crowd, demanding light and space between dancers and catching each other’s eyes in glances that say they hope these kids aren’t the future. From Alan’s perch on the wall, he spots Gad, toes pivoting, heels rising, his entire body gliding above the gymnasium floor in perfect agreement with the music. A glistening nun slides a wedge beneath the steel door; the burst of warm desert wind passes over the sweaty crowd unnoticed. Gad sways, flows, and bounces, looking truly comfortable as he twirls the girl in front of him around.
The one place
, Alan thinks,
where Gad has more power than me.

The generators are fired up; no loss of power can ruin the end-of-the-year dance. While the younger students sway and shuffle, Alan sees that the boys who are due a letter from the Registry in the morning dance with the most abandon. Except for him.

Inches away from Gad, a girl Alan has never talked to but now realizes he has always loved does the same wild steps right back. The song rises to a scream, followed by a pause—a gap in sound that Alan is sure that every dancer on the gymnasium floor but him seems to have anticipated—until a blast of horns replaces the silence and every one of his whirling classmates lets out a joyful shudder that races up the length of their bodies until the entire crowd throws their heads toward the rafters and howls along.

Other kids are with him, involuntarily pressed in a row against the wall. None of these boys are halfies. They’re all full-blooded Indigenous, no exceptions. Girls, it seems, even the Homeland Indigenous ones, find half-breed features irresistible. The thumps of Alan’s heart are unreasonably hard.
Why can’t I just grab a girl and get out there?
In every area of his life, he is strong, powerful, a leader. Only now, when girls and music are involved, does the world become lopsided. Small skirts, swaying thighs. On every female face he sees a smug look of separation. Their deepest desires are all aimed elsewhere.

Across the gym, three girls sit in folding chairs. These girls are, Alan knows, the leftovers. The few erotic model types that dampen the socks of everyone are spoken for, their feathery bodies floating high above the dance floor. These final three are the clumsy, the uncomfortably zitty, and the thickly bespectacled. But through the crowd, Alan sees a fourth girl has joined them. He has spoken to her before. She is pleasant, she has a pretty smile on her longish face, and she is, he realizes, the deliverance from all his problems.

He angles his way toward her, passing through waves of dancing couples, his throat dry, the five words forming in his throat. It’s not hard, he tells himself. Five words and she can end the misery.

Closer, only steps away.
Would you like
. . . The words are there, ready. Two more steps and he’ll be right in front of her.
Would you like to
. . . He will need to be close for her to hear him over the music. He will need to lean in.
Would you like to dance?
Easy. And then, slanting in from a sharp angle, a much shorter boy steps in front of him. Whatever magic collection of words this tiny idiot speaks, Alan cannot hear. He watches the long-faced girl extend a shockingly perfect hand as he leads her toward the dance floor. Alan lets out a deep breath. Perhaps he can continue exhaling, he thinks, and deflate himself right into a pile of clothes on the floor.

His face raw, he runs to the bathroom. Catching his reflection in the mirror, he cannot recognize the dainty, weak boy before him. Without thinking, his fist bursts out, hurricane-like, and smashes into the mirror. He can barely hear the shatter of glass over the music.

Back in the dormitory, the murky, unnatural rhythms are still easy to hear, and he wants desperately to escape the heavy bass rising up in the chilly desert, bouncing his failure from one old building to another. Yes, that kid was an idiot, but such knowledge still leaves Alan’s insides pickled and hopeless, because that idiot also has a girl to dance with, a girl who despite her greasy face still has hair that shines under the bright light, tapered hips that accommodate a pair of hands perfectly, and heartbreakingly long legs that Alan has only ever glimpsed from knee to ankle. And she chose to dance with that half-breed mother-raper? Maybe Alan had made his approach from too far in the shadows. Maybe it was he who she had truly been looking for.

Yeah, right. Logic, he sees, is piss-poor at sending shame on the run.

On the hard bed of the empty dorm room, a woman comes to him. But it’s not any of the girls from the dance, all of whom had avoided eye contact as they awaited their chance to grind against someone with an appropriate percentage of Majority Group features. All those girls waiting for anyone, Alan thinks, but him.

The Majority Group lady appears, and he talks with her.

“How major?” Alan asks her in a whisper. He drapes the fleshy front of his elbow over the bridge of his nose; the more darkness, the better.

“Incredibly major,” she says. “Make it wild. Show them who you are. You’re about to ship out anyway.”

In the darkness, he can see small spins of color on her lips.

“No one has to get hurt,” she says. “Not if you do it right.”

“Gad should help me.”

“He won’t understand. Gad’s a halfie, you know that.”

Alan sits up. “Yeah, but you’re full-on Majority Group.”

No answer. The woman is gone. Everyone else is still at the dance, swaying ecstatically around the gym at varying speeds. Now it’s just Alan and Hazel the guinea pig, the tiny rodent squeaking pitifully, both of them biting at their cages. Time to make it wild.

17.

The cabin was small. Fungus had begun to eat away at the wood where the logs scribed. After a few circles around the house, Joe could see it was a solid structure with good bones. With Benny in the back of a Registry truck, Joe had no key. Without Benny, there was no clear way in.

He did a quick few paces around the perimeter. A moment of fierce relief that he was in a place where he could feel the wind and smell the dirt. All the windows were shut tight, locked. On the west end of the cabin, hidden from the lake, he came upon a small apple tree. The stalks were thin, dying even, and most of the apples had fallen to the ground, but there was one still on the branch, ripe and ready to go. A dazzling red globe with a small thumbprint patch of yellow, Joe stared at the apple with a violent, motherly love. No one would hurt this apple. He would not pick it, he decided, until Benny was here and the future was a vivid bloom. Only as he turned to walk away did he remember that Benny was in the hands of the Registry. The vision of the two of them sharing that apple faded as quickly as a morning dream. He left the apple untouched and went back to the front of the cabin.

The door was solid. Joe gave it a few light kicks, then some harder ones. Nothing was working. Joe thought about his mother and father, harmonizing in church with their supreme confidence at the mysterious order of human events, the Young Savior smiling down at them. They exhibited a faith that didn’t allow for the loneliness and confusion he felt, and it crossed Joe’s mind that a state like his own would vault their heads off. They had never been placed in a situation beyond all doubt. Though they thought they had all the answers, they had never truly needed them.

Food, books, earmuffs, gloves. These were the things Joe needed. He looked around the lake. The lake was it. A lake and some trees. Mountains and rocks, stumps and leaves. And no Benny. As the stars emerged, the squawks of strange birds stabbed through the air. The chiming voices of the forest had, up until now, been soft and welcoming. But now, with the cold rising, the place began to reveal its true self.

Benny hadn’t mentioned how cold it would be. A burst of icy wind clawed his face. The weight of what was happening was fully upon him. He could not get into the cabin; at this elevation, he could not stay outdoors for the night.

A dark mass of clouds floated across the sky to take away Joe’s last rays of light. He put a hand in front of his face and watched the colors of his palm slowly dim to a fuzzy nothing. Thick coffee and warmed milk, a hot mug to wrap his hands around, where was anything he had ever wanted? Darkness settled in, and soon the objects around him faded. With the air cold and metallic, Joe went down to all fours. It was time to break a window.

Knees steering, Joe kept his hands flat in front of him, palms in the dirt, and lightly tapped the ground in search of a good-sized rock. Frozen mud and flat grass slipped between his fingers, and for a brief, pleasurable moment, he saw himself as a little boy in his parents’ backyard, dragging his body over the soil of his mother’s peonies until his present life thrust itself forward in the sharp slice of a rock across his palm. A surge of blood poured from his broken skin. It hurt like hell. One palm was bloody, the other numb with cold. In the distance he saw a streak of light hurtle through the sky: a shooting star.

Nobody knew Joe was out here but Benny, and Benny was gone, disappeared when he was needed most. The two of them had never been apart.

In his animal position he could smell the wormy odor of the dirt beneath him. A picture of Benny’s head entered his vision, and Joe saw himself kicking it. Ten imaginary kicks to Benny for being himself, and five more to his flat head just for being someone Joe needed so much.
Young Savior, help me.

The swaddling chill felt gigantic. His fingers jingled with the pricks of ten thousand tiny stones, or whatever the hell was driving upward into his hands from the ground below. Still on all fours, Joe had yet to find a good rock to break a window with. He kept crawling, unsure if he was going in circles or not. The cold air stuck to his lungs like a plaster cast. A lump formed in his forehead, an understanding that his own stupidity and hopefulness was the reason he was on the black ground at all.

The lump pushed itself behind his eye. The picture window along the side of the cabin. That was the one. The lump slid down to his throat. A flash of blue before his eyes, along with the fallen notion that for every person there was a glistening other to alleviate the loneliness of being. His left knee bumped against something promising, and Joe reached back and felt a stone the size of a fist. Gripping it, Joe stood up, dropping the lump down his gullet. A small bubble exited his nose and fell to the ground. His chest felt like he had swallowed a razor.

A cloud must have moved and allowed the moon to show up, yellow and round, lighting the surface of all the objects around him. Silhouetted trees jumped off the large window of the cabin. Joe looked into the night before him, and from low in his throat, unbidden, his body released a sound.

A thousand trip-hammers pounding rapidly, a million percussive drills shattering dense rocks into crumbs. The sound from his throat was terrifying, a baleful chorus of all the evil creatures trapped inside him. Where was Benny when he was needed most? The stone in Joe’s hand felt impossibly smooth, carved and chiseled to a fist-sized globe, perfect for his grip. Arm whirling, Joe’s voice raising high, he knew that the trees would swallow his cries.

Nothing will stop just for me.

Louder and longer, arm windmilling faster with each revolution, Joe pushed out air, the pitch of his scream growing until he finally heard a tremble in his voice. Joe let up his grip on a downstroke. The rock sailed through the glass of the front window, vanishing the lump in his grand noise that was piercing the blackness around him. The hole wasn’t large enough. He would have to throw a few more rocks. He did, until the space was big enough to crawl through. As he snaked his body into the window, a small shard of glass cut his shoulder and left a long, deep slice in his skin. But Joe didn’t care. He was inside now.

The cabin was entirely dark and completely still. Joe’s head bumped against a low-hanging lamp. A short-legged table knocked against his shins. He rushed to the tap, desperate to run hot water over his tender hands, but the faucet let out nothing but the slow hiss of a deep sleep. If he was going to miss his induction, he needed to plug the hole he had made in the window. And get food. All by himself. Benny had been swallowed up. The only question was whether he would let himself be swallowed, too.

For now, he found a cold bedroom and slept.

His dreams were gruesome. Over an impossible connection, his mother yelled: there’s a plan for you, a destiny! But even in the dream, Joe knew that when unrolled, her insipid shouts were parts of a story she hadn’t thought to read to the end, her own advice ignorant of the fact that the Young Savior had slipped away early, that the carefully plotted diagram of Joe’s life and purpose was stacked in a high pile of papers rotting on an untended desk. At least he wasn’t alone; thousands of other destinies lay below and above, all of them left to languish while He enjoyed His eternal lunch break, a hundred First Tuesdays passing by in the blink of an eye.
A little help?
Joe shouted into the treetops. No answer, of course; his words fell into a bottomless mass. There was nothing for Joe to soak himself in, not even a drop of His old bathwater.

In the morning, the cold sun poured through the window onto the bed, warming his legs and feet. A yellow dust coated all the furniture and countertops, the tiny motes making small tornado swirls through the air as if disturbed by Joe’s presence.

The light of day allowed Joe to make a survey of his new surroundings. The cabin consisted of a kitchen with a bar that bled into a living room, a small bathroom with no tub, and a large, rectangular bedroom. Knotty pine for the walls, oak for the straight-backed chairs, and no personal touches to the place except for a dusty vase with some long-dead flowers on the heavy elm table in the dining room. No generator for blackouts. Mice droppings bordered the edges of the walls. Light jumped off the little pieces of glass from the front window that Joe had shattered the night before. The shards were everywhere, and he made sure to keep his boots on.

The light on the stove was beyond dead. In the bathroom, as Joe slid open the shower door, a team of roaches burst into life and skittered down the drain. When he turned on the water to drown them out, the liquid oozed from the showerhead mealy and brown. Benny’s uncle had stocked the kitchen well. Joe ran his fingers over the cold metal cans and did a quick survey: boneless turkey, pork chunks, cooked ground beef. The bookshelves were empty except for a massive, ripening stack of old newspapers.

For the next few minutes, Joe picked up the rocks that were scattered all around the cabin. They had rolled everywhere: under the couch, into the fireplace. He needed to talk out loud; without the sound of his own voice, there was a complete absence of human life. “How’d you get here?” he said to a rock that sat in the bottom of an empty wastebasket.

Poking around for more wayward stones, he found a crackled pamphlet demanding answers in regard to the aging of Homeland leaders. The anonymous author detailed the lives of a series of cabinet members who had become fathers in their seventies and eighties, all of them allies of the prime minister. Thanks to Fareon, the pamphlet claimed, these jubilant men were thriving well past their expected expiration dates. The pamphlet struck a tone of conquered spirit, of hope burned and flattened. What power, the pamphlet asked, might a few timid antiwar legislators, the so-called Coyotes, have against these men who could live forever?

After a few minutes, Joe tossed the yellowed booklet aside. He hadn’t heard of these statistics, hadn’t read before about these old men and their babies. But even so, there was no time to think about the wide chasm of life expectancy between the prime minister’s cronies and everyone else, no time to think about why these old men weren’t dying. All the days he had ever lived were rushing toward one: First Tuesday. Joe needed to make a choice.

Whatever happened in the next stretch, he knew his decision needed to be sharp and unbreakable. Instead, all he had was a dull and gnawing doubt.
Young Savior, help me.

In a closet, he pushed aside more old newspapers until he came upon a toolbox. He decided to cover the smashed window, a reasonable gesture, he thought, whether he stayed or not. From that same closet he grabbed a heavy jacket with mold-stained sleeves, shook it, and went outside. Laid against the back of the house were three large sheets of plywood. There were nails in the toolbox, as well as a short saw with long, sharp teeth. After measuring the size of the window and marking the dimensions on the wood, Joe found two flat stones and laid a plank across them. As a makeshift sawhorse, it would have to do.

The saw’s teeth bit into the wood. Like anyone else, Joe had seen pictures of Homeland hospitals with rows of torsos, bodies chopped at the waist, humans cut short, their structures flipped open. His sawing was smooth and clean, and the wood didn’t splinter. As he worked, the world above him poured out blue birdsongs he couldn’t understand. But Joe also knew that in this same moment, with each stroke of the saw, coffee was being served piping hot at the Unicorn, wild-haired men were being trimmed and trained and boarded onto buses, and that the solid earth still spun on its axis even with him up here all alone and not witness to any of it. Even though the air was cold, Joe broke out in sweat. He finished sawing, and the wood was cut down to size.

Picking up the plank, Joe listened as the leaves crunched and rattled beneath his feet. His parents would have liked a call, Joe knew that. First, his mother would ask about church, followed by a fatherly monologue about how the door to a respectable life started and stopped with Joe showing up at the induction center and coughing on command for the Homeland. Joe thought back to the religious classes he had faithfully attended each and every Sunday of his youth. The prophets, he knew, when they needed to think on something, to locate the ultimate origin of a problem, would go apart from their towns and live for a time in agony and solitude. So far, so good; he had that part down. But that was it. Ostracism and exile were all he had accomplished. What was the next step?

The whole forest is chattering,
Joe thought,
but there’s nothing I can take from it.

With a final heave, he lifted the plank to the window frame. Immediately he recognized that he had miscalculated. His measurements were off, and the plywood had been cut far too small for the inset of the window.

It was early; the sun was still plenty high. If he wanted to leave, to surrender himself to the Registry, he had to decide soon. A bird called down from the trees. He checked the measurements of the plank and tried again, lifting the wood against the frame. It still didn’t fit. His sawing, his measurements, something had been off. All alone, Joe thought, in the earthly beauty of the forest, true isolation, just vast swaths of wilderness, a wide and empty landscape, devoid of the one person he wanted to see. Or anyone, really.