This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  These angels seemed to have outfitted themselves in matching khaki uniforms. One of them was far taller than the other. A mouthless voice spoke down at him with a commanding spiritual swagger as it pulled a piece of paper from Benny’s pocket. “What you’ve got is a bus ticket for Rural Sector M leaving in about an hour,” the angel said. This angel had the airy voice of a child. The snow in his head sung itself into water. The sound was stunning.

  “And twenty Currencies, he’s only got twenty Currencies.”

  “Not a lot for a runner.”

  Benny hadn’t known angels dealt in such earthly matters. Their voices were whispers from the far end of a long tunnel. One of the angels continued to inspect the pockets of his coat.

  “Let’s purge our sewn clothes,” Benny called up to them. “Let’s have an upsurge of wildness.” The trees at his uncle’s cabin were kind trees, trees that helped a person solve problems, trees that showed a visitor a good time and let you be exactly the person you were. There weren’t trees like that around here, not anywhere. Benny tried to tell this to the angels.

  “Does he have any idea?” said the first angel.

  “Why do we even want him?” said the second.

  “I’m worried that we do.”

  Benny didn’t like that the angels didn’t like him. “Hey,” he said. He would plead his case, replay this scene, and turn it around. But before he could form the bits in his head into a defense, the angels stopped being angels and turned into faces, converted themselves from messengers into men, both of whom, Benny saw, seemed to have some sort of writing in a patch on their shoulders.

  “Hey,” Benny said. “Welcome back to the brotherhood of humanity.”

  One of the men twitched his lip, the other frowned, and Benny saw a moment of understanding pass between the two of them. Before he knew what was happening, Benny felt a terrible sting in his jaw, and the men’s faces disappeared into black. Darkness everywhere, and his own face on fire. Benny could feel the world again.

  It hurt. Badly.

  12.

  Lorrie’s mail had piled up: newspapers and magazines that Lance stacked against the back wall of his kitchen. As Lance dropped another day’s paper onto the teetering pile, he glanced at the sickly, disembodied words. The next First Tuesday, a headline told him, would also be the twenty-third anniversary of war. One column over was news of more attacks, this round stranger than the last. A Homeland Religion church defaced and a historic statue of the Young Savior altered; the Holy One himself—blessed be He—was now clothed in a Homeland Army uniform. Below the marble was a small bomb that had not gone off, buried in a huge sack of charcoal. Why charcoal? a columnist asked. Foreigns don’t even barbecue.

  Lance shook his head. Just another newspaper on the stack.

  Reaching down, he grabbed his sketchbook and began to draw. Irises and pupils, he decided. After a few passes, he realized that the eyelids on the paper contained no hint of life, nothing of Lorrie’s spark. The air sagged around him, and he tossed the sketchbook away, smiling as it hit the floor with a loud slap. When he heard the knock at his door, he had not stood up in nearly fifteen hours.

  “Apple?”

  Standing in his doorway was his neighbor Tim, a bright green apple in his palm. “Haven’t seen you around,” Tim said.

  This was true. Lance called up the glittering sight of Tim’s girlfriend Rebecca in his apartment, the two of them visiting during some long ago dinner party, warm wind filling the air, her lips wrapped around a Substance Q cigarette. “How the hell did you get an apple?”

  Tim smiled sheepishly. Though Lance could not remember the last time he had bitten into an apple, he knew that had he come across one, Tim was low on the list of people he would think to share it with.

  “So?” said Tim. The apple, it seemed, was just the beginning, an offering so Lance would allow him over the threshold and through the door. Lance shrugged and stepped aside. He took the apple from Tim and placed it on the counter. Finally, something to look forward to.

  Lance knew his apartment looked blank, as though some permanent sense of home had been sucked out of all the objects, but now he saw the place through his visitor’s eyes. A stale smell coated the room, and a thin film of dust rested atop every surface.

  “I’m sorry about Lorrie,” Tim said. He sat across from Lance on a low ottoman that he squeezed with his thighs.

  “Yeah,” said Lance. Tim’s acne scars—or maybe it was razor burn, who could tell?—rode down his cheeks in staggered strips, deeper and more lurid, Lance thought, than the last time he’d seen him. Lance looked around some more, if only to not have to stare at Tim’s face. “How’s Rebecca? Sorry my place looks like shit.”

  “Rebecca,” Tim snorted. “She’s gone, zooming around specially zoned Homeland Indigenous Districts. Says she’s three twenty-fifths Group F or something so she’s called to fight the quotas.” His smile was a shadow, left over from some earlier, happier time.

  “What quotas?”

  Tim shrugged.

  “When’s she coming back?”

  Again, his shoulders rose and fell.

  Lance was shocked. Though he knew Tim and Rebecca had their problems, he had considered them a stable force, a repudiation of the idea he often heard other people say: that young people in these tumultuous times were finding love and stability to be an impossible combination. Incredible, he thought, that some half-dreamed conception of Rebecca’s past allowed her to disappear into the most rugged sector of the Homeland.

  “How did it—”

  “Forget it,” Tim said quickly. He rocked back and forth on the ottoman, fingers tapping against the sides.

  Through the large rectangular window that looked onto the street, the downtown towers glimmered in the distance. It was a beautiful view, tempered only by a few of the low-lying dark clouds that Lance vaguely remembered reading were acidic, or toxic, or perhaps not clouds at all, but massive puffs of carcinogenic vapors.

  “I’m going, you know,” Tim said quietly. “The Registry got me.”

  Lance shifted his head away from the view and back to Tim. “And you’re really going?”

  “And I’m really going.”

  The two of them sat there, Lance sunken into the excessively soft couch, Tim on his backless square, posture slumped. After a few moments of silence, Lance offered coffee. In the kitchen, he opened a few cupboards before returning to the living room apologetically. Of course he didn’t have any coffee.

  “You really are going?” Their departed girlfriends, who had both opposed the war so viciously, added a special layer of quiet to their conversation.

  “I am.” Tim’s look was blank, protected. “Do you hate me?”

  Lance thought a moment. “No,” he said. He stared at the dark clouds. “To be honest, I can’t say I care.”

  Tim said nothing.

  At a point like this, Lance had thought it would be different. Had Lorrie been by his side, he might have been moved to stomp and storm. He would have meant it, too. “I don’t mean that to sound like it just did,” Lance said. “I just can’t find anything else in me right now. My instincts tell me it’s a pretty bad choice you’re making, but every other part of me is just screaming that it just doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Tim said softly. “I thought so.”

  “What any of us do, really.” Lance wished he still had it in him to call Tim a puppet of the Homeland, a baby killer in training. He dug hard within himself, searched for any sort of burn, for that anger that arose from certainty. Instead, he breathed out a hard exhalation of emptiness.

  A dampness took shape in the corners of Tim’s eyes. Perhaps, Lanced hoped, this meant they would not have to talk about the war or the Registry any further. He thought about offering a Substance Q cigarette, or two glasses of whiskey. A good smoke or a heavy drink, anything so they didn’t have to get into that. They’d have a few drinks, he’d pat Tim on the shoulder and tell him good luck, shut the
door behind him, bite into that apple, and never think about the guy again.

  But such a world was not to be. Tim declined the Q, said no thanks to the whiskey, and instead sat in front of Lance silently, his shoulders low. Even the toxic clouds hovering outside the window seemed more upbeat than the two of them. Time to get rid of this guy, Lance thought. But just as he opened his mouth for some sort of closing statement, Tim began to speak.

  “I’ve thought the war through,” Tim said.

  Lance cocked his head and listened as Tim began a long monologue in which he spoke nothing of the struggle against Ideology Five—still after so many years the stated purpose of the war—and everything of helping Foreign villagers who could not help themselves. He spoke of moral duty and purpose, of a transfiguration both mental and physical that would catapult him into realms where lesser men feared to tread. He said he hoped to stand firm against indifference and hate, to know when to object and when to flee, and that any fear he had was weakness. The key, he felt, was to not deny the fear and to not deny his weakness. This, he was sure, would translate into a valor that would drag him from the life he currently led, in which there was little to fear because there was little he cared about. He hoped to be assigned to a light infantry brigade.

  So the guy wanted to share what he was about. Fair enough. Besides, it wasn’t every day someone offered up their own brutal truth: Here was a story about how people thought about fighting in war.

  Such a story had always been withheld from those closest to him. As each brother had left, there had been no recognizable pattern of fear or desire, no narrative of how or why. Instead, each one had simply known it was his turn, accepted this as fact, and then departed.

  “Just a handful of days,” Tim said. “Then I have to get myself to the induction center. Didn’t make that First Tuesday cutoff, though. I guess it’s too crowded or something.”

  Only then did the spinning realization come to Lance that compared to him, Tim’s handful of days was a quiet, blue-winded paradise, whereas he, Lance, looked out at life from a barren rock stranded in an empty ocean. A handful? That was a lifetime. Lance had forty-eight hours.

  A siren screamed down the street, its screech echoing into the distance. Both of them turned toward the sound.

  “Hey, have you heard from Lorrie?”

  Lance looked at him, but Tim had spoken to the window.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  Lance shook his head.

  “Do you want to know where she is?”

  Lance couldn’t tell if Tim was offering information or inquiring into his state of mind. “What do you mean?”

  “Could you find out where she was if you wanted, but you haven’t tried to find out? Or could you not find out, and so you haven’t tried to?”

  “I don’t know,” Lance sighed.

  “Because I was thinking, maybe I could write her. Just say hello, tell her how you’re doing, fill her in on what you’re up to, if you want. It might be nice to hear from a neutral friend.”

  “Okay.”

  “But?” He saw Tim wipe his palms on the side of the ottoman.

  “But I don’t know where she is,” Lance said.

  “Right.”

  “Soon, though, I’ll know.”

  “You’ll let me know when you find out?”

  “Is that why you came here?” Lance said. “To talk about Lorrie? I think about her enough as it is.” From down the stairs, the wheezy asthmatic neighbor coughed a series of chalky coughs. After a moment, he added, “She probably wouldn’t want to talk to a soldier anyway.”

  “Maybe so,” said Tim. He had a look in his eyes as though he had suffered the same kind of gaping loss despite the fact, Lance thought, that he had imparted the story of Rebecca’s departure with spectacular indifference. “You might be right.”

  Lance stared at Tim, trying to grasp whatever thoughts were doddering around his brain. He felt unclear about what, in fact, he was seeing. “Whatever. I’ll tell her to write you when I see her,” he promised. “Not too long from now.”

  Tim nodded his head and started talking, this time faster than before, again rocking back and forth on his ottoman. “The war would be a good thing for you to find out who you are on your own,” he said.

  The overhead lights buzzed and turned off, and as they did, Lance’s thought that he should discuss his own impending induction passed. No, sharing that he was going to run would be absurd. People who thought war was good for themselves were quick to pounce upon those who didn’t. If he told Tim he wasn’t going, the guy would point him the second he left. Tim, he could see, had invented for himself the role of the soldier, and now he thought everyone should play it.

  Lance closed his eyes and pressed down hard. Already Lorrie was being erased from his memory. Her nose, her dry lips, that was all there, but what about what she might say to him right now? He opened his eyes, but his world was still black.

  “Just one more thing,” said Tim. “Not about the war.” He stood up, so Lance did, too. “I am so, so sorry about Lorrie.” Tim leaned over and hugged him. At first, the touch was shocking, a bright green surprise in the darkness. Lance could not recall the two of them ever having had more contact than a handshake. “I know how much you must miss her,” Tim said. A few deep sobs, and Tim dug his fists into Lance’s shoulder blades. If Tim meant for something to be passing between them, Lance couldn’t feel it. They had become different, too different, all while sitting across from each other in Lance’s small apartment. As the embrace went on, all Lance could feel was deep embarrassment for the two of them. Why was Tim crying now? He had remained sober and dry-eyed as he imparted the story of Rebecca’s departure. Following the story of the annihilation of his relationship, he had slipped in his decision to go to the bloodiest war in Homeland history in a sturdy, assured manner, and now, at the mention of Lance’s departed girlfriend, of someone else’s love having vanished, at the two of them clasping together for a touch, only now did Tim’s eyes swirl in their sockets and drop sloppy tears onto the floor. None of it made sense, and a vague uneasiness crept over him.

  “Enough,” Lance said, peeling himself away.

  Perhaps, Lance decided, it was impossible to have his own grief lessened by a man on his way to the jungle, a man, he was sure, who was about to die.

  13.

  Each Sunday, Sally and Mr. Dorton drove three hours to see Daniel at the military hospital, and each time they did, the doctors told them he was closer to release. For the first time, they were frisked upon entering.

  “New policy,” said the guard at the checkpoint. “Just the other day, there was a failed bombing of a military hospital up in Western City North.”

  “No one was hurt I hope?” said Sally.

  “No, ma’am,” the guard answered, though he only looked at Mr. Dorton. “They filled two ambulances full of charcoal, stuffed them top to bottom, and tried to light them up. Didn’t work, though. These damn Fivers are probably planning something for the twenty-third anniversary. Especially considering it’s a First Tuesday and all.”

  “Oh my,” said Sally. “How can people be so awful?”

  Mr. Dorton had no time for small talk. “Can we go in now?”

  To get to Daniel, they walked past rows of damaged men, missing fingers, popped-out eyeballs. Even so, those boys didn’t mean much to Mr. Dorton, not right now. The doctors claimed Daniel would be ready to go home soon, complete with two arms, two legs, and three medals. And his Benny didn’t know any of it.

  On the expressway now, headed home, after another silent hospital visit with his boy. In the side pocket, a crumpled pamphlet handed to Mr. Dorton from the split-springed bed of a mangled young veteran he did not know. “Take this,” the boy had croaked as Mr. Dorton passed. The outstretched arm was impossible to avoid as the anonymous boy was parked in the hallway, another one of the overflows.

  Never one to refuse a veteran, Mr. Dorton had obliged, taking the pamphlet. What he read sh
ocked him. The good prime minister, so resolute in the war against the barbaric Foreigns, so patient in his determination to rid the world of Ideology Five, slandered not for his policies, but as a driver of an occult agenda to immortality.

  “What in the hell,” he asks his wife, “is Fareon?” They drive slowly. The roads are not good.

  “Never heard of it,” she shrugs.

  “Can you believe this thing?” Mr. Dorton can feel the blood rising to his face. “Just because the prime minister is getting on in years, just because some soft mineral or what have you is only in Foreign hands, it’s just—”

  “Daniel seemed good today,” she interrupts.

  But Mr. Dorton isn’t finished. “Never die? People on this Fareon never die? Do they even realize how ridiculous that sounds? It’s people like this who are blowing up our buildings.”

  “I thought it was Ideology Fivers.”

  “The idea that the secretary of the interior fathered a child in his eighties,” Mr. Dorton continues. “None of my papers mentioned such a thing, not to say—”

  “I think Daniel was excited to see us. Don’t you?”

  Mr. Dorton takes the hint.

  The visit had been no different than any of the others: Daniel stares at the wall. Sally stares at Daniel as he stares at the wall, Mr. Dorton gets so he can’t take their unmatched gazes and his son’s cruel silence, so he stomps out toward the nurses’ station and tells stories to the ones who will listen. Only the old and wrinkled do. When Mr. Dorton leaves the room, Sally reports that Daniel shakes and cries.

  Back on the expressway, Sally keeps her eyes in front of her, doesn’t shoot them Mr. Dorton’s way, he notices.

  “How about,” he asks her, “you ask your brother up there to go around Western City North and take a look for Benjamin?”