This Is the Night (5 page)

“And one other thing.” His father had wrested control of the receiver once again. “Benny Dorton called. Long distance. I am not an answering service. You tell Benny that, you hear?”

Sudden circuits of joy burst forth from the balls of Joe’s feet, pausing for a moment before racing up his body and rolling deliriously around his temples. “What’d he say, Dad?”

“You’ll tell him that, won’t you? I can’t be called at all times of night.”

The levels of joy began their imperceptible ebb. “Did he leave a message?”

“He said you could find him at the millhouse. Does that mean he finally has a job? Benny Dorton with honest employment? Mr. Dorton will be glad to know, if that is the case.”

Joe said nothing.

“Joe? You’re still there, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“If you do happen by Benny, be sure and ask him to call home. I ran into Mr. Dorton, and he asked me to tell you that, in case you saw him.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“It’s an important matter about his brother, I believe. And one more thing—”

“Nope, gotta go.” He had everything he needed. More, really.

Joe hung up the phone and stepped out to the street. For the first time in a long while, he didn’t feel exhausted after a conversation with his parents. He asked the first wildhair he saw for the cross streets of the Millhouse, and headed that way.

The place was easy to find, but the neighborhood wasn’t pretty. Even the vets looked more mangled, more in need of repair. As Joe walked, the hungry, gleaming stares of women followed him across the pavement. Most were subtle: a slyly cocked head, an eager smile, but a few of the older ones—women who sparked the moment their shining eyes spotted a male gait—called after him.

“What’s your name? Where you headed to?”

Joe kept his head down. None of it was personal. They were calling after ghosts, mostly: husbands or boyfriends who were gone, their bodies decaying in the soil of the jungle.

Finally Joe spotted the Millhouse. On the side of an old motel next to the coffee shop was a large billboard: “Point Them Out”
the letters demanded. No one knew what actually happened when you called the Point Line on someone, only that if that someone was on shaky status with the Registry, once the Point Line had the person’s name, that was it. Poof! Top of the pile, and then you were gone. Pointed.

“Spare Currencies?”

An unpleasant voice hoisted up from the sidewalk below. Joe paused to look at its owner, a man sitting there with his shaved head exposing a lacerated scalp.
Newly returned from the jungle, probably just a year or two older than Benny or me,
Joe thought. A red cleft adorned the right side of his head, an injury that looked pretty bad until Joe’s eyes spotted the man’s feet. One leg had been poorly amputated, and the skin of the nub was badly infected.

Joe shook his head. “Sorry.”

“I don’t need your sorrow,” the vet said. “I need some Currencies.”

Joe took a breath and pushed his way into the coffee shop.

There at the counter was Benny, asking for a free refill. All the blood in Joe’s body crowded into his face. To Benny, he could have said a million things.

Benny spoke first. “Oh, wow.” His voice was a chilly reminder of the distance between them.

But there were other problems, too, Joe saw, much more obvious ones than Benny’s stormy inner weather. To begin with, Benny’s face didn’t look good. Scabs marked its surface, and he needed a splash of water. Joe absorbed the expression of his oldest friend and felt a sad shudder within. No, Benny was not excited to see him. Never in the same way.
Young Savior help me,
he thought. But that phrase was automatic, and Joe pushed it out of his mind, too. The Young Savior had never helped him with anything.

“What do you mean, ‘oh, wow’?” he asked Benny. “I waited for you. At the Unicorn. We were supposed to meet this morning. Where were you?”

“Long story.” Benny shook his head. “Just got some free coffee, though.” A wide smile appeared on his face, and in a flash the scabby version perished and the old Benny came into sight, the one that gave Joe a route, a course. Here was the Benny he had been missing.

They angled themselves toward an empty table. Neither had any money for food, but judging from the scattered plates abandoned on almost every surface, their poor finances were probably for the best. Even the panhandling vet outside would have rejected this stuff: spotted eggs boiled for so long their yolks were covered with a sick green film, bowls of damp figs with a rotten mold smell, old bread, sour yogurts.

“Yeah, sorry I didn’t show,” Benny said, taking a seat. An unseen force pushed his eyelids down and hooded his pinhole pupils. He looked around more than Joe thought necessary.

“Why are you over here? We never come here.”

Benny shrugged his shoulders. He was dressed in the exact same clothes he had been wearing when they had said good-bye last week, only now they hung off his frame as though the dirt had stretched the fabric loose.

“So according to our greetings,” Benny said, “we’ve got four days.” Reaching in his pocket, he came out with a crumpled letter.

“Our greetings?” Joe looked at the paper. There was no runaround like on some of the forms. In bold letters at the top of the paper, this one said exactly what it meant:
Order to Report for Induction.
Right below was the prime minister’s seal and the sad black type that said it wanted to take him.

“Everybody calls them
greetings
now,” Benny said.

“Oh.” Joe paused. “I read somewhere that the first Tuesday of every month is the biggest induction day.”

“Right,” Benny said. “First Tuesdays are the worst.” His fingers tapped the uneven table, and a pearl of coffee rolled down the side of his cup.

“Did you even go to the Unicorn?” Joe asked.

“Yeah.” Benny sniffed.

“This morning? I was there for hours.”

“Yeah?” Benny’s eyes dug holes in his coffee.

“No one had seen you around.”

“Laying low, you know?”

“I thought maybe you got caught up in that thing over in Quadrant Three.”

“What thing?”

“You didn’t hear about that? Some car was stuffed with bombs, almost blew up a warehouse?”

“Why a warehouse?”

Joe shrugged.

“Fuckin’ Foreigns.”

“Well, get this: people are saying it wasn’t Foreigns. The car, the prints on the bombs. They were Homeland citizens.”

Benny took a deep breath. “Whoa. Sympathizers. That’s new.”

“No one really knows. Some say angry Homeland Indigenous or something.”

“In Western City North? Those guys aren’t around here.”

Joe nodded, but he needed more. He waited without hope to hear what Benny had to say. He didn’t need hope; Benny always had something.

Leaning toward him, Benny drummed his fingers against the tabletop. “Look, Joe, I heard about this book. It’s hard to track down, but it can help us. It tells you how to beat this thing. It’s for us, exactly for us, is my understanding. All that killing to stop the Foreigns from spreading Ideology Five crap?
Not for us. Not anymore. I’ve got this.
We’ve
got this.”

“A book?”

“A special book. Twenty-two years of hidden information.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“Fuck you.”

They both smiled, but Joe was devastated. A book? He wanted a plan.
I’m not going to let these guys take us,
he thought.
The Registry can’t do this to us. Take those other guys, those strangers on the street. But not me and Benny.
He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. “It’s got real info?”

“Yeah. They say it does.”

All that sleeping in a closet had made Joe stiff and stale, but he could see it had done something else to Benny. Wherever Benny had slept, it hadn’t killed his fire, and just like always, Joe could sense that he still believed in an out, even when all evidence pointed to the fact that his fierce desire to believe was just that.
What’s the name of the book?
Joe could have said.
How come no one else has figured it out? How come we’re the only ones who can get it?
And finally:
You think the words in some book are special enough to get us out of this?

“Don’t look so mad, Joe. We’ve got a plan. We’re not going to let these guys get us.”

But he was mad. What the two of them had was special. And once the Registry pried it apart, Joe could not see how they would get it back again. Even the Young Savior had said it:
What you truly love, you do not let go.

Above, the lights flickered off, the voltage around them slipping down to nothing. Another rolling blackout.

Benny got up to go to the bathroom. Joe forced himself not to watch that familiar dragging stride, drew his eyes away from the brush of Benny’s thighs. A man in a fringed vest stood up and followed Benny into the bathroom. Onward yet.

With Benny in the bathroom, Joe’s mind began its automatic reversion to a more joyful time. The two of them had grown up in the same complex, just a few blocks away from each other. Both their fathers worked in the prison, but Joe’s father wasn’t a guard and neither was Benny’s. At the time, the two boys were sure this made them special. In the mornings before school they would steal the newspapers off their neighbors’ porches and read the comics out loud on the walk over. On the way, they would dodge gangs of refugee boys, angry kids whose worlds had been broken apart after First Aggression and now loved nothing more than to throw a fist at the natives. As soon as class let out, Benny and Joe waited for each other outside the chain-link fence. Sometimes other boys wanted to play with them; Joe always said no, but Benny could usually convince him otherwise.

After what seemed like a long time, Benny returned from the bathroom. With an electric groan, the freezers, stoves, and lamps came back to life.

“I mean, here we are, you and me, sitting in a coffee shop,” Joe said, “and all the while the Registry has got its fingers at our throats.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Benny, waving his hands. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Fine. Have you been reading the papers?”

“Not really.”

But what papers were the ones that needed reading? Years ago, as one of his first moves in office, the prime minister had showered grants and tax breaks on anyone looking to start up news channels, newspapers, even radio stations. For the public good, for an informed citizenry, he said. Currencies were bestowed upon anyone who correctly filled out the forms. What’s the plan for today? the joke went. Oh, nothing much, just starting up a national newspaper.

Only now, years later, there was far too much information, and Joe had little idea if any of it could be trusted. As a result, he paid attention to almost nothing. Except, of course, to what was right in front of him. And in front of him now, he saw, was a wolf in the guise of a sheep.

“That guy in the fringed vest,” Joe said, indicating the man with his chin. “He’s been watching us the whole time. He got up and followed you when you went to the bathroom.”

“C’mon, Joe. You’re always so worried about people. Don’t worry about him. He’s whatever.” Benny leaned in closer. “But how about that other guy?” He pointed to a man with short-clipped hair and black-rimmed glasses on the other side of the café, cracking peanuts out of the shell one by one.

“You think he’s Registry?” said Joe. “I mean a Reggie?”

Benny’s laugh was spare and gravelly. “Not everybody’s an undercover. He looks like that kid we used to have chemistry with.” The man with black-rimmed glasses pushed another peanut shell with his thumbs. A little part of the peanut flew an unexpected path into the lens of his glasses.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, you know who I mean. What’s his name, who was always taking notes and wouldn’t share them. Not that I remember much from chemistry. Well, maybe something about particles being matter, or matter being particles, but that even these rules are just, like, experimental facts, not—”

“We shouldn’t be talking about this, Benny. These are the wrong things to talk about.”

A drip of sweat slid down Benny’s forehead, stopped briefly at his temple, and picked up speed as it cleared a path through his stubble and fell to the floor. Strange, because it wasn’t hot in the Millhouse.

“For real,” Joe continued. “The Registry has called us in. And we’ve got no plan, nothing at all.”

“Yeah, besides, whatever we did or didn’t learn in chemistry is probably useless by now.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

Benny tilted his chin. “I already told you. We do have a plan. The book.”

Again the lights flickered out. This time they stayed off. The second rolling blackout in less than an hour.

A silence hovered between them. Friends for their entire lives, they were unable to talk about the only topic they should be talking about.

“It is weird, though, right?” Benny had always had a habit of beginning his thoughts in the middle of a conversation. “When you really think about it.”

Usually Joe was able to follow the swirling gusts of Benny’s rapid shifts in thinking. But even a few days apart from Benny could make him hard to interpret. “What’s weird?”