This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  Even so, not a day went by without the Millers being pelted with questions about life in the Eastern Cities before First Aggression, that fateful series of coordinated attacks in which the Foreigns had cast the first stone so long ago. No one was under any illusions that the shuddering emptiness of such a small, out-of-the-way rural location could ever compete with the former cultural capital of the Homeland. But still, the townspeople had questions. Mr. Miller, who thanks to his service was missing an ear and several toes on his left foot, had told Lance that people were far more interested in the screaming gearshifts and unending high-rises of the old Eastern Cities than any of the balled-up gobs of horror he had witnessed fighting Foreigns in the jungle. Lance was convinced that the Millers were from some raw-edged place that he couldn’t yet understand but that might one day become the course of his life, if only he paid attention. As long as the path opened into a clearing different from that of his brothers. He did whatever Mrs. Miller told him.

  “Construct the difference,” Mrs. Miller said. She stood over Lance’s shoulder, ignoring the other students as she whispered advice into his ear. “Each stroke must address the logic of the entire production.”

  Lance nodded. He found it nearly impossible to understand her pronouncements, but a hush welled up inside him whenever he actually got down to work. All the questions about what Mrs. Miller meant fell away, and an idle grace washed over him that softened his body and allowed his hand to take charge.

  Around this time, Lance’s father headed west with a woman who was not his wife. No one knew who the woman was, only that the two of them had met either at the old train station on the north end of town or over on the east side, with its cluster of overgrown cattails and rickety houses built for First Aggression refugees. Most said the train depot. It made sense; ever since the takeover of the trains, the warped and empty building had offered darkness and privacy while double-stacked boxcars rushed by with the raw materials of war.

  Wherever it had happened, the story was the same: Lance’s father, a sporadically employed lineman, was assisting with the effort of electrification, finally bringing long-overdue power to the farthest homes at the edge of the Sector. The project was already unpopular—why give more people electricity when the rolling blackouts still afflicted those who had it? But the assignment was clear, the funds earmarked, and providing access to electricity that the Homeland didn’t have was what Lance’s father had been doing when a woman in a domestic Brand 22 automobile, or maybe it was a bubble-roofed Brand 12—the stories differed—pulled onto the shoulder and asked for directions.

  Lance knew his father had never been spontaneous and thought the whole story strange. One conversation with a woman in an unknown car and his father had tossed his family aside for a new life? But as unlikely as it seemed to Lance, it was also real and true. To some, it made sense: undamaged men were a catch these days, the woman had been young, and Lance’s father, though fierce, was a handsome man. And with all the boys being sent away, why should the remaining older fellows not trade in for a newer, younger model? Wasn’t this sort of thing happening daily in bigger cities throughout the Homeland?

  With his home life a murkier blend of sadness and bewilderment than ever before, Lance threw himself even further into his work and Mrs. Miller. She allowed him to pursue special projects and during class left him to labor away in the corner of the room on whatever he wanted while his less gifted classmates practiced fundamentals of perspective and proportion. If she knew about his brothers, she never asked, never offered up those pale and wiry smiles of sorrow and sympathy. For this act alone, Lance loved her.

  Alongside the twelve daily newspapers his mother subscribed to, a cascade of brochures for art school poured into Lance’s home, each glossy page soaked with complicated directions regarding the proper way to submit a portfolio, block letters demanding obscure widths of slides bathed in tungsten lighting and ordered in an ambiguous numbering system. In even smaller print, a rigid warning that prospective students who ignored these rules were wasting the school’s time as well as their own. No photo studio within two hundred distance-units could conjure up the equipment to meet these stiff requirements. Well, said Mrs. Miller, you’ll just have to send them originals.

  “You’ve got to bring each package inside,” the mailwoman at the post office told him.

  “I can’t just drop them in the box?” Lance asked.

  “Not since the latest round of attacks. Damn Ideology Fivers.”

  Soon another deluge of mail began to arrive. Rejections all, though some included critiques that both chastised him for not following the directions and used phrases to describe his art like “amateurishly macabre.”

  College, Lance had been told, had become increasingly competitive with everyone applying to avoid the Registry, though there were rumors that this exception, too, was changing. Art schools, he was convinced, were bogged down in applications from scared men with mediocre skills trying to get out of the war. Not that it would have mattered. Tuition, it seemed, had risen nearly 200 percent since the year before. After the twelfth thin envelope, Lance decided he couldn’t stand one more rejection and dropped out of school. Though he knew his failures were not her fault, an iron dislike for Mrs. Miller and her ripe praise overtook him.

  “I never want to see you again,” he told her on his last day.

  With Currencies on loan from Lance’s second-oldest brother’s widow and her one-armed new husband, he plunked down a small deposit on a dark efficiency in the sleepy center of town. There was no resistance from anyone in his family; Lance’s mother was too busy trying to figure out what had happened several years ago with a young woman on the edge of town. The emptiness of her home and the deaths of her sons had become nothing more than strange distractions as she slipped far into her unanswerable questions of why and how.

  Lance’s mother visited only when she didn’t see him in church. He didn’t have a phone. All of his clothes and possessions fit easily into three paper grocery bags. A small and poorly equipped photo studio in the back of the town’s only bookstore hired him to work shifts in both. The job was easy; his life became simple, prefabricated. And then, he wanted to say to the woman in front of him at the brightly lit diner, I met you.

  Lorrie and Terry were as strange to Lance as a pair of left-handed scissors. In the diner, Lance learned that Lorrie was from one of the few inhabitable cities in the Eastern Sector of the Homeland. Her father had just moved to Interior City for work. She had met Terry at University 282—a very elite institution, they explained, as the three-digit schools were the most discriminating—and the two of them had read some book in a literature course and realized they both wanted to drive across the Homeland and get rough-and-tumble when and if the situation called for it. Together they had skipped most of their classes and spent their time, they said, bumming around “the city.” Exactly which city they were referring to, he wasn’t sure. Like so many others, Lance had almost no geographical knowledge when it came to the intricate, Swiss-cheese disorder of the Eastern Sector of the Homeland after First Aggression. Even all these years later, keeping track of which of those distant cities had been fenced off and abandoned was a difficult task.

  Lorrie continued to overload him with information about her life. A father who served in the early, tame years of the conflict, cousins and uncles lost to the Foreigns, but no brothers. Lance kept silent about his own losses; the compassion of strangers had never moved him, no matter the extent of their beauty. As Lorrie went on, Lance found himself driven by visions of the dark hair of his arms against the skin of her slightly rounded stomach. He decided he had a perfect idea of what her belly button looked like and made a note to himself to transfer the vision to paper.

  “You know they’re going to admit men soon,” said Terry. “Everybody says it’s just a matter of time.”

  Lance hadn’t known University 282 was for women only, though he did understand that most schools were now de facto single-sex ins
titutions anyway.

  “Not that there’s any to admit,” Lorrie said.

  Terry rolled her eyes at this statement of the obvious. As Terry and Lorrie debated the impact of a male presence on campus—a presence they both agreed would consist primarily of very rich men’s sons—Lance took large gulps of coffee and lifted his eyes from the lip of his cup to steal long glances at Lorrie.

  “I don’t even know where exactly you girls are going,” he said.

  They exchanged a quick look he noticed but could not interpret and told him they planned to start new lives in Western City North or Western City South. They couldn’t decide which.

  The waitress—whose tangled and desperate love for Lance he had neutrally noted and promptly ignored since the days when the two of them had struggled to master the alphabet around a kidney-shaped table in a small classroom—came over and refilled Lance’s coffee.

  “Anything else, Lance?” she asked.

  “I’d like a soda,” said Terry.

  The waitress frowned.

  Lorrie and Terry both seemed amused. “Have you ever seen the ocean?” they asked him.

  “Which one?” He hadn’t seen any.

  “How about this menu?” said Terry. “You would think they still had fruits and vegetables outside the cities.”

  Lance had not realized that produce was still affordable anywhere in the Homeland. At least in his sector, the authorities had been very opposed when it came to allowing females to be farmers. Too many women doing traditionally male work, they said, only made the lack of men more glaring. Better to carry on as usual, though “usual” meant rampant shortages and rationing. Perhaps it was different elsewhere. Still, Lance knew better than to display his ignorance and instead nodded wearily, hoping the expression on his face mirrored that of the two Eastern Sector sophisticates across from him. “The pies are pretty good,” he said, gesturing at the laminated menu. “Banana cream is their specialty.”

  “Bananas?”

  The light in their faces saddened him. Had he not made himself clear? The “bananas” were nothing more than silken tofu pulped with marshmallows and a spray of liquid flavoring.

  Lorrie accepted the artificial banana news with a sigh and began to share a vague future plan of taking night classes with the eventual goal of being the person who took patients’ blood pressure and stabbed them with needles but wasn’t a nurse. Mostly, she said, the job would be to fund her political work.

  “What kind of work?” Lance asked.

  “Political,” she said, slower this time. “Do you know about the Coyotes?”

  “Coyotes?” Lance asked.

  Two men in the booth across from them turned and stared.

  “Not so loud!” Lorrie said. “We’ll talk about that later.”

  “So why Western City South?” he asked.

  “Or North,” Terry said.

  Terry and Lorrie explained to him the differences between the two far-off cities and how they wanted to put distance between themselves and their former classmates, most of whom were focused only on the race to marriage, the need to find a healthy vet or a suitable older man. The blood of Lance’s brain carried the information that left Lorrie’s lips through the proper nerve fibers and pushed it into the appropriate cerebral sections, but even so, Lance found he couldn’t really concentrate. To calm down he looked across the table at Terry. She uttered a few comments that made it clear she would prefer Western City South. Not as many blackouts there, she said.

  “Do you like living in such a small town?” Lorrie asked him. “Does everyone know each other? Do they all get along?”

  Just looking at Lorrie from across the table showed him a thousand new possibilities. He considered her questions and answered them as thoughtfully as he could. Lorrie and Lance began to talk like Terry wasn’t there, and after a while she got the picture and took a walk around town. As the conversation shifted into new and different concerns, Lorrie quoted a Foreign author Lance had never heard of in a way that she said was a perfect description of the current muck the Homeland was caught in.

  “Oh?” Lance said, and raised his eyebrows.

  She loved to read the Foreigns, she told him. Again, more glances from nearby tables. Homeland authors were too provincial, she went on, too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. “The Foreigns have an awful lot of answers,” she said.

  “Isn’t that Ideology Five?” Lance whispered.

  “Absolutely not,” Lorrie snapped back. “Haven’t you noticed that the prime minister calls everything he dislikes Ideology Five? When you do the research, the actual ideas behind it—”

  “Here’s your soda,” the waitress said, plunking the glass down just a bit too hard. Lance wasn’t certain if the look of disgust on her face was because she had overheard their conversation—both of her brothers, he knew, had been lost in the jungle—or simply because he had always ignored her advances and was now sitting across from a beautiful stranger. Once the waitress walked away, Lance tried to move the conversation toward an area in which he had more to contribute, but Lorrie wouldn’t let him.

  “It’s scary, almost,” she said. “Dangerous how much those Foreign books have in them. Sometimes I don’t want to see that deep into people, you know?”

  Again, Lance didn’t know. He found himself wondering how flat words on dead paper could ever be dangerous or help anyone see into somebody who was real and alive. Lorrie raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to speak. “Of course,” Lance said. “For sure.” Lance had no idea what he meant, but he knew that she had sucked him into a current of desire against which he didn’t even bother to struggle. When had he last read a book? And one by a Foreign at that? Whatever. For this fantastical goddess in front of him, he realized he would drain his eyeballs dry. Just point me to a library.

  Lance pulled a pen from his pocket, and while Lorrie went on about her favorite Foreign book, he captured the fine lines of her fingers in sticky blue ink on the napkin in front of him.

  “Hey,” she said, glancing down at the drawing. “You really know what you’re doing.”

  But Lance didn’t hear. He was light and airy and indestructible. He was working.

  As Lance and Lorrie were leaving the diner, the lights flickered out. The other patrons groaned and gripped their coffee cups as though they were the very source of life themselves. The day’s first blackout.

  Good timing. Lance and Lorrie smiled at each other. Good timing.

  Wherever they were going, Lance knew it would be better than where he was. “Take me with you,” he said.

  When they met back up with Terry, Lorrie pulled her aside and explained Lance’s promise to pay a third of the cost to realign the frame and more than his share of food money. From his vantage point, Lance could see a distinct lack of enthusiasm on Terry’s part, but after a few minutes of Lorrie gesturing, he finally saw Terry shrug and nod. When the two of them looked his way, he could feel a wide smile making its way across his face.

  Walking down the block to the bank, Lance withdrew his entire savings. Once that piece of business was taken care of, he headed home and grabbed his three paper bags of clothes. On top of his unmade bed he left a note for his landlord and dropped two postcards in the mail: one to the widow of his second-oldest brother and the other to his mother’s on-again, off-again best friend. By the time the recipients got around to telling his mother, Lance figured he would already be in Western City South or North. The bricked-up buildings and flat-faced residents of his small interior town would be left behind. With only two weeks until his eighteenth birthday, he would sweep himself into someplace entirely different.

  In a moment of excitement, Lance told Lorrie they could talk the whole two thousand distance-units to the coast.

  She gave him a funny look. “What are you, crazy? We’re driving a Brand Eight. No matter how good a shape we get that car in, it’s going to moan and sputter so loud all the way, you won’t be able to hear a thing. Everybody knows you can’t
have a conversation in a Brand Eight.”

  “I’ve never been in one,” he said.

  “Don’t you read books?”

  “Books say that Eights are loud?”

  “Some do.”

  She was right. The three of them cranked down the car’s sticky windows and shouted to one another over the rattles and clanks as they passed through strange cities and towns. Around them spiky plants popped out of the dry dirt, the perfect light tracing the edges of their hard, dark leaves against the nothingness of everywhere else. Twelve hours after they began their journey, they were pulled over at their first checkpoint.

  The next morning, there were three more. Dark and hungry potholes threatened to swallow the entire vehicle, the wide, axle-scraping muddy pits yawning widely in the roads. Often they were forced to drive at what seemed to Lance like no more than a fast trot.

  Headed due west, the three of them argued Western City North versus South. The simple fact that Terry had a slight preference for the southern end of the Sector made Lance push for the north even harder. None of them had ever visited either city, though Lorrie had read a good deal about both. Unable to decide, they agreed to split the difference and aim for somewhere in between.

  On the last day, they didn’t stop to sleep. All through the night, they kept themselves awake by debating the Homeland’s efforts to control the makeup of the workforce. Sure, there were women cops, women janitors, pretty much women everything. So why wouldn’t the Homeland let them farm?

  “Do we even know that’s what’s happening?” Lorrie said. “I read that these crazy jungle bugs are eating all the crops. They hitch rides in the eyebrows of returning soldiers.”