This Is the Night (37 page)

40.

Whenever someone says he’ll gladly point you in the right direction, you know that person is full of shit. How was Joe supposed to know where the induction center was? He had never been to that part of town. But clearly the noseless vet he’d asked for directions had sent him off in the wrong direction. Only after two buses and a long, uphill climb did he finally arrive at the induction center. Now he saw he hadn’t even done that right. His shabby route had plunked him down on the wrong side of the building.

The lack of a rear entrance didn’t surprise him. Joe had seen photographs of First Tuesdays in the newspapers before. If the long line of men were to stream toward whatever open door the induction center flung open, what sort of image would that be? No, the men needed to be arranged, one behind the other. When the Homeland projected order, people felt like there must be a plan. All must pass through the front. But for Joe, there was no version of his life in which he walked through that door alone.

His eyes shifted toward a bright flash of sun shining on an open steel grating. Could it be so easy? The words of the Young Savior came to him:
Everything with wings is beyond the reach of law.
And with that, Joe started up the fire escape.

41.

On Mr. Dorton’s desk, the bowl of strawberries was always full, and he was never stingy with them. From this, Lance took that Mr. Dorton must have been a wealthy man and a very good father. Though he must have known why Lance was there, probably could have cleared up definitively whether he had been pointed or not, their daily exchange of words never included anything but questions from the older man regarding the former life of the younger one. Had he ever been to Western City North? Of course, Lance told him. That’s where I lived. Western City North was wild.

“Did you cook food or eat out?”

“Both.”

Did he own a television, did he ever go see any of the retiree leagues play? Mr. Dorton wanted details. This guy, Lance thought, is trying to piece together a life that’s based on mine but doesn’t belong to me.

“You know,” Mr. Dorton said, his voice lowering, “I have a son in Western City North.”

“Oh yeah? It’s a big city. What part does your son live in?”

Mr. Dorton gave an exact address.

A rainbow of shock shimmered inside Lance. That a father would know his son’s exact address from memory. But even more, that such an address would also be the very space where he and Lorrie had lived and breathed together.

“Are you okay?” Mr. Dorton asked.

Lance had begun an extended coughing fit. Four units. He could narrow down all the residents immediately. Which one had been a Dorton? His internal census began on the bottom floor, striking out the asthmatic widow. Moving across the hall in his mind’s eye, he came to the door of Tim and Rebecca, or just Tim once Rebecca had left him on her Indigenous quest. An upward gush of fear entered him. Had he held a knife to the throat of Mr. Dorton’s son? Impossible. Tim had talked about his father before, said he was one of the few casualties in those first years of war. Lance studied Mr. Dorton some more and let his internal surveyor climb those familiar stairs. Mr. Dorton clearly wasn’t an immigrant from Neutral Country P, so that ruled out the many war-aged cousins who had often crashed in the apartment across the hall from his own. Only one apartment left: the empty place, the place that had belonged to the runners.

He could see the faces of two men, one of whom he had bumped into on the stairs with a duffel bag, the guy clearly headed out on the first step in a long series of Registry dodging, and the other one, a quieter guy with an indistinct face who tended to follow the loud one around. The guy he had caught on his way out—the loud one—Lance had seen him before, staring at Lorrie as though she might be his next catch. The quieter one he had seen around as well, but that one had always kept his head down, barely able to compose audible hellos and good-byes. But what were their names?

“Benny,” Mr. Dorton said in a whisper. “That’s my youngest.”

No shit. Mr. Prison Administrator Big Shot had a runner kid. The guy was no different from anyone else.

Excited for any news, Mr. Dorton pressed him for questions about where Benny might have gone. Still unclear whether Benny was the loud, lusty one or the silent follower, Lance offered as much as he could, which was very little. Soon Dorton’s questions reverted back to general queries regarding life in the building. Did Lance read the papers? Did the other young people his age in Western City North? The media up there was very biased, did he know that? They probably underreported the body count of that recent attack outside Interior City. Damn Ideology Fiver journalists.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lance said. “I don’t read the papers anyway. Who can keep up?”

More questions. Did they regularly tune in to the prime minister’s weekly address, had they heard of the Coyotes, this thing called Fareon? The questions continued, though, really, each one was the same: What had happened, Dorton seemed to be asking, for the world to come to this?

42.

Just what I don’t need,
Craig Camwell thought. Twice in one week he had run into Dorton at the front security gates on the way home from work. And on today of all days. Surely even Dorton looked at him with disgust; at least his Daniel had valor medals and other honorifics, the most decorated soldier in the entire sector. Now, he noted Dorton’s grin, the whole smile cataloging every accolade the Homeland had heaped on his eldest. More than ever, Craig Camwell wished his coffee table contained a scrapbook of clipped articles denoting the bravery of some phantom son of his own, anything to cancel out Joe’s cowardice. But his coffee table was empty. Joe was all he had.

The morning had started off well. The papers were reporting that the prime minister had recovered his health and planned on giving his first radio address in weeks. With a huge chunk of boys reporting for duty on First Tuesday, Craig Camwell had no doubt that these young inductees could benefit from the prime minister’s charismatic words as they were shaved and suited up. Perhaps his wayward son Joe would finally get some sense and be one of them. Plus, today the war turned twenty-three. Yes, even with Joe missing, Craig Camwell had been cheered by the news that the prime minister would return for this evening’s radio address. Sure, the prime minister was quite old, but wisdom, after all, is a gradually accumulating resource. Besides, the ever faithful had always known: any prophet among them would be marked with signs of wonder.

At 5:50 p.m., with the sun slowly disappearing behind the horizon, Craig Camwell headed out to the parking lot, eager to drive to church and listen to the speech with his fellow congregants. But there, in front of him, was Dorton.

They started off with small talk, soon establishing that both of them, per some whim of the warden, had been assigned convicts to assist them with menial tasks. Word around the complex was that Dorton had gotten a dodger, but of course the topic of runners went unmentioned. And yet, it could not be ignored completely. Not too long ago, the warden had turned away a shipment of Registry-running Substance-smashers caught in the net of Operation Lowlife. Both men agreed that their boss was a soft man. What harm could there be in packing the overcrowded boys in the detox zone a bit tighter?

“How’s Daniel?” Camwell asked. Questions about Dorton’s wayward son, Benny, were awkward, but his colleague’s war hero son was fair game. For sure, Craig Camwell thought, he was ready to gloat; any of the dealerships or real estate agencies in town would snap that kid up the moment he walked in the door asking for a job. Who wouldn’t want a Homeland war hero on the payroll? Why the hell did Dorton keep him cooped up in the house?

“Ah, yes. Daniel,” Dorton said. His voice sounded sunken, far away.

Craig Camwell noticed that Dorton’s eyes seemed brackish and misty.

The two men stood, paused in front of the second security gate, colleagues shuffling around them, eager to head home. Neither mentioned that today was First Tuesday, that the rapidly fading light around them meant that the deadline to report was near. Both knew that the other’s son was up for induction. Neither had any idea what his boy might do.

Dorton tried to speak, but nothing came. It was, Craig Camwell thought, quite out of the ordinary.

“If you find him—” Dorton began.

Craig Camwell waited.

“If he doesn’t go in this evening. If you hear from Joe—”

Dorton seemed to be having trouble swallowing. After a moment, Craig Camwell bounced an open palm against his shoulder. “You all right, Dorton?”

The sunlight had all but vanished. If the Young Savior had any sway at all, Craig Camwell thought, their two boys would be approaching the front door of the induction center at this very moment. A voice came over the mounted weatherproof speakers.
This is an emergency announcement
. Both men turned upward toward the sound.
Please return to work and gather in the chapel immediately
. A gust of wind burst forth, and the leaves of the trees began to shiver and shake.

“Now that’s unusual. What do you think that’s—”

“Snap his fingers off, Camwell,” Mr. Dorton said. “Shoot him in the foot if you have to. Don’t let your boy go over there. Don’t let the Registry get him.” Even his ears drooped downward. “Just don’t let him go.”

43.

From the roof of the induction center, Joe can see it all. To his left, a thick bank of fog has rolled over the eastern half of the city. To the right, the soft light is slipping away with the sinking sun. It must be close to six. From below, the sounds of protestors, of lined-up men, their weight shifting from one ankle to the next, of tearful good-byes, sobbing mothers and brothers and sisters and wives.
Two birds circle overhead, two birds of a kind he has never seen before, though he doesn’t know bird names anyway. From out of nowhere more join in and begin to circle with them. They are perfect, these birds, cleaved together with no leader, not questioning for a moment that the loose and sloppy circles they make in the air are exactly what needs to be done.

Below, the faint click of camera lights. Like startled bugs, the men scurry away. Immediately the chants of the protestors take a distinctly feminine turn. After a moment, the sounds from below melt away, and Joe hears his parents begin to sing. They would be in church now, as they were on all First Tuesdays, listening to the prime minister’s speech before breaking into their favorite hymn, voices bouncing off the great window above the balcony in which the Young Savior commands that every last one of their flock preach the gospel to all those with ears to hear.

Above him, the birds circle lower and tighter. Joe can hear the sweet, tuneful voices of his parents. He knows that the words to these hymns are in his mother’s and father’s hearts, that their eyes will not look to the lyrics even once.
I shall wing my flight to worlds unknown,
they sing.

Worlds unknown are the only kind that have any appeal. Joe watches the birds. The thought comes to him that if he leaps into the air, they will accept him as one of their own.
I can be them,
he sees
. I can leap, and I will enter their world, and we will join together to make a clean thing from an unclean one.

Leaning over the cold aluminum handrail, he looks at the crowd below. Six o’clock must be minutes away. “Where are you?” he shouts down to Benny. “Why aren’t you here?”

Benny doesn’t answer.

Maybe I won’t fall,
he thinks.
Maybe I’ll enter with the birds into their loose circles over the rocks and thistles and streams and be received and complete. Even just a moment of being them will save me. They’ll brush their wings against me.

One foot over the rail, then the other. The birds circle. There is one step between Joe and those worlds unknown.

“Benny!” Joe screams again. The shifting crowds below drown out his cry. But what does it matter? Benny is not among the skittering heads down there. No, he is probably wilting away in some rotten cell or perhaps is already on a plane to the jungle. Even so, Joe wants Benny to tell him that his plan is okay. With Benny gone, Joe decides to ask Him, but he knows that he cannot think the universe, that he knows nothing about the Young Savior except what He is not. Ridiculous, Joe thinks, because he can see that He is not anything. That is how it has to be, he decides: His silence is His speech, and His words and His silence are the exact same thing, and maybe His answer is already up there circling. Maybe silence is the only help the Young Savior can give.

The thoughts come:
I don’t belong to the Homeland, I don’t belong to the Registry, and Benny, who belongs here, with me, is nowhere.
A key change to the hymn in his head, his parents’ voices rising along with the rest of the congregation. The birds circle tight. Joe edges his toes forward until they rest on nothing but air. Just a bit farther. Young Savior, help me.

There are no more rules, Benny thinks. Minutes till six and the tone of the crowd shifts into one of frantic and feverish good-byes. But still, he cannot have imagined it; he had heard that voice. But there are too many sounds and too limited a view from the wooden bench. “It can’t be true!” he hears a protestor say. If Benny leaves the bench, the Indigenous kid gets shot between the eyes. If he stays in place, the whole crowd might get blown to bits. But what about standing? Had the baldheads prohibited standing on the bench? If he stands, he might spot Joe and shout to him, tell him to come to the bench. Before, the crowd was just a crowd, a bouquet of strangers who could not be saved. Now Joe is hidden in that crowd, and this knowledge changes all that he must do. Benny rises to his feet and climbs atop the bench. The tops of the heads before him are a complex geography, sobbing, chattering, moving, small bits pushed around by a large storm. He even hears the unmistakable sounds of laughter. Laughter? Why are these people in the crowd so nuts? There are too many strangers among him; the dim light of the few working streetlights is not enough.

A distant church bell begins to chime. At the same time, the first man in line starts his approach to the front door. In seconds, the van will be expecting a signal. Another chime, the first recruit nearly at the door. Again the sounds of laughter from the crowd. Benny leaps from the bench, apologizing to the Indigenous kid whose time on this earth he has cut short. Joe is somewhere in this crowd, he must be, and he cannot let Joe down. He pushes his way through the knots of people. “It is true, it is!” he hears as he twists through the crowd. “All the stations are saying it! All of them!” Benny grabs shoulders indiscriminately, whipping them around in the hope that one of them will be Joe. Jo
e, who has been here all along. Waiting for him. The clock strikes six.

Inside the van, the heat rises. On the radio, an announcer is talking. Both the tall man and the Indigenous kid see the shadow they know to be Benny rush from his bench, and both understand his leap to mean that there are now only moments until he makes them, seconds until he taps the shoulder of a uniformed police officer or one of the obvious undercovers circling the crowd to point out the unmarked van full of baldheads and an Indigenous kid with a detonator in his hand. Only, Benny is not running away from the site where the blast will be. Benny, they see, is running toward it.
Time of death
, the voice on the radio says.
Not yet available.

“Turn that down,” says Alan.

“What the hell is he doing?” screams the tall man.

“Hold on,” says a baldhead. “Turn that up.”

“Stay ready,” says the tall man to Alan.

All watch as Benny makes his way through the grip of chaos, separating the rapturous crowd. Each moment expands; the seconds are swollen and full as Benny races toward the front doors of the induction center.

“What is wrong with these people?” asks the tall man. Even from inside the van, all can sense the collective shock clattering through the crowd in front of them. Nostrils widening, eyes blinking in an effort to adjust themselves.

After so many years in power
, the radio says.

“All these people are crying,” says a baldhead.

“Of course they’re crying,” says the tall man.

“No,” says the baldhead. “This First Tuesday is not like the last one.”

“Should I push it?” says Alan.

“They’re not crying, they’re laughing,” says another baldhead.

On the twenty-third anniversary of the conflict he championed
,
the announcer continues.

A third chime from the nearby church bell. From the van, all eyes squint through the dusk as Benny grabs someone, sees his face, and moves on, rotating another man by the shoulders, the two of them directly below the first-floor flower box stuffed with explosive charcoal.

He was ninety-six years old,
says the radio.

“Did you hear that?” says a baldhead.

“Quiet,” says another. “We need to focus.”

“Now,” says the tall man to Alan. “Push it now.”

In the low candlelight of her apartment, Lorrie holds the letter in her hand.
I have heard about what you’ve been up to
, she reads.
I have heard about what you are doing
. Her lips are pressed tightly together.
We’ve had our differences, but the Reggies will have me any day now and I need your help.
Lorrie’s cold breath dissolves onto the paper. Eric’s handwriting is unchanged, but behind his words, for the first time, there is a flicker of humanity. Of someone who needs the aid of another.

Because it is First Tuesday, Lorrie knows the Center will be open late. Ten minutes before six, she pushes through the double-glass doors of the Center, her stride strong and free. Back through another old doorway. Almost all the faces she sees are new, unfamiliar. Eric appears from behind some dark corner and asks her to follow. His posture is uneasy, and he moves in slow, halting steps, a man who knows what he wants to say but is unsure of how to say it. In the same back room where she had labored away typing his notes, Lorrie wonders how she has allowed herself to come back to this place. She makes a silent promise that she will not let her old surroundings degrade her new self.

“It’s the twenty-third anniversary,” Eric tells her.

She understands why he mentions this, that to confer meaning on such a number is both real and meaningful in one sense, though completely unreal and meaningless in another. Also, he says, his mother is back, released from some unmarked prison, though Jane has returned a poorly assembled version of the woman she once was. Lorrie begins to ask for details, but Eric stops her. “I don’t have much time,” he says. “I’m supposed to be at the induction center in ten minutes.”

“Well, go ahead, then,” Lorrie tells him.

He does not apologize, makes no expressions of regret or sorrow for his past arrogance. His words are clipped and quick, and Lorrie must lean forward with her good ear to take it all in. A rosy shine of evening sun falls onto his face just as Lorrie begins to understand. Eric’s time is done, over with. The Center is stagnant; almost all his volunteers are reporting this evening. As for Eric himself, the Registry has knocked on his door for the final time. He begins to wax on about the superhuman splendor of the human spirit, but sees Lorrie’s expression and catches himself. “Pardon me,” he says. His shoulders slump, and his little eyes shoot around the room. She knows he cannot say it, so in her mind, she finishes his sentence for him.
I’ve become too used to having people listen to whatever I have to say.

“What is it,” she asks, “that you are saying?”

“My time is done,” he says again. “What I’ve tried to do for this place, it hasn’t worked.”

“And you finally want me,” she asks him, “to come in here and help?”

Finally Eric looks into her eyes. His forehead is damp, his voice is pitched several octaves above his normal speaking tone. “Come in here and help the Center?” A small, bitter laugh escapes from his throat. “The Center doesn’t need you, Lorrie. The Center is done. I need you. I need you to save me.”

Lorrie stands to leave. No one, no matter who they are, jumps ahead in the queue.

“Put in a good word for me?” Eric calls over her shoulder. “Please. Just see what you can do.”

In the car, she switches on the radio and hears the somber announcement. Year after year, and finally it is here: the news too large for any one reaction. She pulls over to gather herself, the wheels of the car perched unevenly on the crumbling concrete beneath a large and ancient tree, somehow unscathed by the passage of time. For despite what she has just heard, she is sure that there will still be men who need saving. At the base of the tree a swath of small ferns envelops the trunk in a sweet embrace. Lorrie lifts her chin upward, the back of her skull settling in between her shoulder blades. She would like to see how tall this tree is, but from her point below, there is no top, only the endless stretch of long branches and brittle leaves. How high the tree goes, how far up its branches stretch, she cannot imagine.