This Is the Night (6 page)

“That this old man can make us do whatever he wants.”

“I think it’s a little more complicated than that.”

“I mean, what is he, ninety? Ninety-five? If some random old guy came up to us right now and was, like, ‘pour your coffee on the floor,’ you’d just say no. But because it’s
this
old guy in particular . . .”

Joe shrugged. The only way to believe that the prime minister’s age was an issue was to read the underground papers, and neither of them had bothered to do it. “Do you think it’s our fault?” he asked Benny. “Do you think we should have known more? Read more papers or something?”

“Are you serious? First off, even if you could do it all over again, you still wouldn’t watch the news or read the papers. There’s so many of them, it’s impossible to choose what information to pay attention to. And when you do listen, it’s completely demoralizing. Second”—Benny was smiling now—“the fact that there’s way too much news does nothing to change the other fact that every paper, every program just says the same thing over and over again. It’s a simple equation. Big paper equals: the war is going well—”

“But watch out for terrorists at home,” added Joe.

“Right. And for the smaller papers, it’s even simpler: the war is wrong.”

“Plus a sympathetic little box in the corner for the latest round of domestic crap.”

“Totally. ‘Small Bomb Dents Registry Truck.’”

“‘Foreign Sleeper Cell or Domestic Sympathizers?’”

Benny sighed. “Same question. Every damn time.”

And yet this world Benny was describing was already becoming simple, unfamiliar. Lately, Joe had heard, a new strain of the underground press had emerged, radio stations and newspapers that let facts whip about wildly like an ocean storm. Not only were they fixated on the prime minister’s health at age ninety-six, these new papers also made an issue of his closest associates, many of them in their eighth and ninth decades as well. A result, these papers claimed, of Fareon. How they explained that it was the Foreigns who controlled and maintained the world’s only deposits differed. But beneath the surface, all the claims were similar: Fareon was helping old men feel young. And the only ones who had access to it happened to be the architects of the war.

Of course, a handful of new radio stations and papers had recently popped up solely to refute these claims. The only thing Joe knew for sure was that the war was absorbing men at astonishing new rates. And here he and Benny were, up next.

Just a handful of days to figure out his entire everything. The Registry had squirmed its way into Joe’s life, and it seemed that the more he thought about his options, the narrower they became.

“I’ll track that book down, and we can meet up tonight at my uncle’s cabin,” Benny was saying. “There’s a bus in a few hours for you and one for me a little after.” He sniffed in again. “We’ll lay low for a while, get out of the city. The cabin is completely isolated. It’ll give us some time to think before Tuesday.”

“Why don’t I just come with you?”

Benny waved his hand. “I just have to handle a few things first. I’d let you tag along, but you don’t want anything to do with these guys.”

Joe wondered what kind of guys had books but were dangerous, too. And why split up? Why not just stick together? Benny hacked a syrupy cough into his napkin. “So we go to this cabin—”

“And we’ll be in this amazing forest, and we can sit and think and maybe forget about all this Registry crap for a minute. Maybe for a hundred minutes.”

“That’s like an hour and a half.”

Benny laughed. The laugh was his real one, Joe knew, rare and deep, and to Joe, the sound was as joyful as the jump of a small child into a warm pool.

In some ways, the plan seemed perfect. Solitude, a completely new setting, just the two of them, a calmness that might lead to the ability to make a real decision. But why split up beforehand? Joe was just about to press again for Benny to invite him along to whatever he was doing when his eyes linked up with the man in the fringed vest who had followed Benny to the bathroom. No matter what Benny said, it was clear that the man was just dirty enough, Joe thought, to be too dirty, the kind of grime that had been carefully applied in front of the mirror in some Registry agent locker room.

“This coffee tastes like shit,” said Benny. “I want an apple.”

“Don’t talk about apples.”

Benny began to talk about apples. He missed them all, the sweet mush of the golden yellow kind used for baking, the tart fire of the miniatures that had been the last to go. But Joe’s thoughts were elsewhere—into the territory of the jungle, into the idea that either of them fighting a war seemed like a case of mistaken identity. They were being pushed into the wrong era. It was not an era either understood or belonged to, but now they were flooded with letters from the impossibly old prime minister, letters demanding physicals, letters claiming they did belong, after all. They were the right shape, of acceptable heights, the right sex, but these letters were made of words, and those words demanded things: packs of muscles, rows of teeth, a thick skull, and internal organs that pumped and drained and performed the proper tasks at the required times.
We are,
Joe thought,
human clumps with the right tools to go and do something we don’t know how to do in a place we have never thought about.

Benny scribbled out the directions to the cabin on a napkin he grabbed from the small metal box on the table. Joe pretended to study the directions carefully, but it didn’t matter. Right then he knew: he wouldn’t let Benny slip away again.

3.

No details had been provided to Alan about the Southwest Sector School for Homeland Indigenous other than the fact that he would be departing for its distant campus in two weeks. He had been twelve years old when they’d told him, almost thirteen. No one referred to the place by its full name.
The School
, they said. Somehow, in the shortening of the proper name of the institution to a generic one, Alan had felt even more frightened at the prospect of leaving his family for this unknown place of learning. Though he could not have known it at the time, his fear was more than reasonable. Within days of his arrival, the truth—as it so often does—made itself plain. The School was a brutish, nasty place.

Now, four years later, Alan sits on the floor of a bright, concrete room. Above him, two bars of light buzz and flicker. Thirty-six hours have passed since he has last seen darkness. The constant neon shine is part of his punishment. Until today, he had never thought of darkness as a privilege. The idea of an outside world, of red sunsets, of passing grey clouds, all of it had faded in the first nine hours of confinement. And just his luck, there had been no blackouts. The room has no windows, only a hard mattress, a metal toilet, and three cups of warm water meant to last him the entirety of his stay.

For his first three years at the School, Alan had dutifully followed the arbitrary rules of the nuns and fathers. He completed his homework on time and performed his work duties beneath the hot sun. But as he entered his final year, he had begun to think more about how he had arrived in the first place. And right now, he has plenty of time to think.

It’s not a choice to go, it’s an order. Alan can see the pain on his parents’ faces, the way their mouths breathe sick, slow breaths and their eyes turn sliced and narrow. They must have held this information all night; they probably hadn’t slept a second.

“Why don’t you have a seat?” his father says gently.

As Alan sits down, he takes in the living room: parents across from him on their new couch, wood with whitewashed finish. The new couch came with cushions that are puffed out and swollen, and lately, the three of them have to sit more often than they’d like so as to deflate the sofa to normalcy. Alan places himself in the low chair across from his parents. The small table separating Alan and his mother and father is packed with objects. The cast of knickknacks rotates frequently, but right now the table is glutted with two wax apples in a cherry wood bowl; an empty wine bottle filled with a mixture of topaz and garnet that an unemployed cousin gave Alan’s mother for her birthday; a white rectangular serving platter with scalloped details; two rams, a large deer or a small elk, three sea captains, and a wire-haired fox terrier, all glazed ceramic; and four folded newspapers, still unread. For a moment he considers flinging a ceramic fox against the nearest wall. Anything to break the awful mood of the house. His parents continue to explain themselves.

“There’s no more room at your school,” says his father.

Do they really think he is this stupid? School is twelve minutes away—three turns, one stop sign, and no traffic lights. In every classroom, there are empty desks. No, they must have some other agenda they are trying to cover up. He waits, nodding slowly, playing dumb.

“No room,” repeats his mother softly. Her head sways from left to right, and her bare foot rises to the coffee table, her bean-shaped toes curling around the edge. The scalloped platter and the bowl of ornamental apples clink together musically with the trembling of her foot.

Today cannot be a normal day. On a normal day, no one would put bare feet on the coffee table.

“We had a visit,” says his father.

Alan’s mother jumps up, grabs him from behind, and squeezes. The fact that she’s hugging him already, Alan thinks, shows that the situation is much worse than he understands. A semisolid picture forms, telling him that whatever this conspiracy is against him, his mother is not behind it. From outside, he hears the wearied bark of one of the stray dogs that use their yard for shade.

“You’ll have to go away,” says his father.

“Because school is too crowded?”

“And because the new school is better.”

A pressure on his shoulders, around his neck. His mother still has her heavy arms wrapped around him, is still bent over him and squeezing hard. Alan feels a wet drop on his chest, and then another, a third, a fourth, a fifth. Her tears drop tiny polka dots onto his shirt.

“Let him go,” says his father. “Let him go for just a minute.”

His mother releases him and returns to the couch. An orange light shines through the window and falls across their knees and ankles. Alan stares at his father, watching his spinning eyes. Is he the driver behind this plan or just another easily manipulated man?

“He’s so young,” his mother wails to no one in particular. “Too young!”

His father places a hand on his mother’s shoulder but locks his gaze with Alan’s. “Come outside,” he says.

Of course he wants to separate us,
Alan thinks. He must know something that she does not.

Outside is better anyway; the zone is scheduled for a power outage, but for some reason the lights and air conditioning are still on. The two of them stand up and leave his heaving mother on the couch. On the way out, his father grabs a small canvas bag and hooks it over his shoulder. Even as he presses the heavy oak door shut, Alan can hear the sobs of his mother.

The view from the front steps is the same as always: dry and even earth dotted with saguaro cacti and sage, the long-eared jackrabbits shooting from one bush to the next, the flat tops of the buttes jutting up in the distance. This landscape is alive. On their driveway, a keeled snake, twisted into itself and soaking up the idle warmth of the concrete.

“Like I said, we had some visitors,” his father says.

Alan squints up at him.

Father and son walk down the unpaved path. The heat is strong and full, and their bodies wade through it. Though their destination is unannounced, both know they are headed to the library. The library is in a poorly ventilated trailer dotted with tiny star-shaped spores of fungus and mold, and Alan has read most of the books there. Still, he knows that if he says that, his father will tell him to read them again. This fire within, the desire to know as much as possible, Alan decides, is the one useful thing his father has given him.

“The men came,” his father starts again, “to tell us to send you to a new school.”

“But I like my school.”

His father’s eyes, always sharp and small, seem all of a sudden deeply sad and inky.

“Why do we have to do what the Homeland says? They can’t tell us what to do.”

“I think this new school will be good for your future,” his father says. His face doesn’t match his words; his tone is out of sync with his drooped eyelids and risen brows. Alan doesn’t believe a word he says.

“Where is the new school?”

“Far,” his father says. “Too far.” This last part is only a whisper.

“A school like Gran went to?”

His father stops walking. “We aren’t the kind of people you can fool like that.” He bends down to place both hands on Alan’s shoulders. “Nothing like that will happen at this school. I promise.”

True, his family is not like the other families that surround them. Yes, they live in a specially zoned Homeland Indigenous District, but Alan’s parents have two nice cars, one of them a flashy new Brand 19 with a bright chrome fender that looks like a sneering upper lip. But the car is secondary to the fact that the house is bolted to the ground and can’t be towed away, that inside the house the floors are shiny vinyl, the water from the tap is cold and sweet, and that both his mother and father have salaried, air-conditioned means of earning their Currencies. They are sharp, his parents, having risen from humble roots, and they don’t believe everything a sweaty Majority Group man in a suit who pulls up their driveway in a government-issued Brand 23 tells them. Or so Alan had thought.

“Did you ask them whether we had a choice?”

Rocks crunch beneath their feet as the two of them start to walk again.

“Of course.”

“You asked the government man? Directly?”

Alan’s father shakes his head. “I don’t expect you to understand the difference between a request and an order. But this man—”

So his father had crumbled. Alan has always suspected that the man who raised him is weak. Now he knows for sure.

“I tried,” his father said. “I really did.”

But you didn’t try enough,
Alan thinks. He switches to a new tactic. “People say those schools starve kids. They work fifteen-hour days.”

“Not true. You’ll see. The library is ten times the size of this one.”

“What does that matter?”

“That means they’re serious. A big library means a place is dedicated to giving you a worthwhile education.” His father stops, lowers to one knee. His face is pinched, but his hands find Alan’s shoulders, pressing him even deeper into the dirt. “The knowledge they’re going to give you at this school is going to last you forever. You need this.
We
need this. What do we always say our people have to do?”

“Be twice as good—”

“And they might give you half,” his father finishes.

But Alan has saved his final justification for last, the one that just might break through. “But kids from that school are the first ones to go to war.”

“The prime minister.” His father stops and looks around, making sure the two of them are alone. “What is he, ninety-one? Besides, wars don’t go longer than twenty years. Just the idea, it’s obscene! People simply wouldn’t stand for that long a conflict! They would . . .” He pauses, then starts again. “By the time you graduate, this war will be over. Guaranteed.”

Alan stays silent. His father’s voice is tender, he thinks, but his answers are empty. How can they be anything but? His father has not fought to keep him.

“I want to give you something,” says his father, slipping the canvas bag off his shoulder.

A rush of wind brushes Alan’s ears with dust. Though his father is still talking, Alan lets his voice dissolve into the wind. He makes a promise to himself:
I will be stronger than the man before me.

“Take it,” his father is saying. In his hand is a bright orange pouch with a zipper running along the edge. The sky is broad and open above them, the sun hot and unrelenting. Opening the pouch, Alan finds a whistle, a nickel-plated compass, and a box of waterproof matches on which is printed: “Burns intensely hot in the strongest winds.”
A survival kit, Alan realizes. A small group of objects placed together in a zippered pouch to help him survive.

“Don’t lose this,” his father says. “You’re going to be in a new kind of place now.”

Four years later, and Alan still has that pouch. He keeps it in a locked chest at the foot of his bed. Suddenly the lights in his cell flicker off. Finally, true darkness. Twelve more hours until his solitary confinement ends. Not that what he has to return to is much better. Even so, anything he suffers with the other boys is better than too much time alone.