This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

The ticket lady frowns again and holds the voucher up to the light as though she’s trying to see into a sealed letter. Her eyebrows draw close, hovering beneath her wrinkled forehead. We’re doomed, Alan thinks.

  The ticket lady holds up a slender finger, then turns around, pulls out a book of timetables, flips through it, and takes out another book from the shelf behind her. “Much as I’d like to accommodate a boy in his last week before shipping out, you’ll still have to make up the difference,” she says.

  “What?” Alan says. It is hard to hear through the thick glass, so he leans into the perforated grille carved into the window.

  “Prices are by distance,” she says, not speaking any louder or closer to the opening. “This voucher you have, well, you’re talking about a few hundred distance-units total. The trip you want? That’s a whole other type of ticket. More distance-units. Much farther. Distance equals Currencies.”

  “How much?” Alan asks.

  The woman frowns again and quotes them an astonishingly high number. “Not including,” she says, a gleeful shudder passing through her, “the repaving surcharge.”

  “The what?”

  “We’ve got to fix these roads somehow. Plus a security fee.”

  “Security fee?”

  “What with all the attacks on buses, we have to manually check every bag.”

  People in line are shuffling and starting to grumble. Alan and Gad step aside.

  The floor of the bus depot is dirty; neither of them want to sit in the muck, so Alan takes off his pack and they lean against the wall. His pack is light; there was little time to grab the essentials. Inside is an extra pair of socks, the zippered pouch of matches, the stolen sack of apples, all of the HIM pamphlets, and his folding steel-bladed hunting knife. Not wanting to be caught with illegal literature, he stuffs the HIM pamphlets down his pants.

  “A question for you,” Gad says. Alan recognizes that Gad won’t quite look at him. “How far have you thought this plan through?”

  “Well,” Alan begins to answer.

  “Because we could still go back,” Gad says. “Deny the fire had anything to do with us, get our assignments, and everything goes back to normal.”

  “Are you crazy? Normal is over.” Alan leans forward. “Now how the hell are we going to get on this bus?” Alan hopes that his tone is strong, charismatic even, but beneath his clothes his knees shake and his fingers wiggle. At any moment some smirking priest could show up, his long black robe now cleaned and victorious, wrap a thick hand around their wrists, and drag them away. Just as Gad is about respond, a Majority Group man approaches them. The man’s tongue drags at the corner of his mouth, and sweat gathers at the bridge of his nose and pools in the basins of his ears. A mercenary, dispatched by the school to capture them?

  Alan stands up straight to take the Majority Grouper’s artificial height away.

  “I couldn’t help but overhear that you guys are in a fix,” the man says. An amazing amount of perspiration drips from his forehead to the floor. Though he’s never been anywhere else, Alan knows that the sun spins faster, whiter, hotter, in this part of the Homeland. In some ways, the suffering man in front of him is a treat. Alan had never heard any of those complaints personally; he’d only read about them in books. Now, in front of him, as promised: a man who clearly cannot take the heat.

  “Yeah, you could call it a fix,” says Gad. Alan pops an elbow into Gad’s ribs.

  “You have anything worth trading?” the man says, wiping his forehead.

  “Not really,” Gad says. “You see, there was this fire at our school and—”

  Alan elbows him again, this time harder. Clearly, Alan thinks, Gad is less suspicious of strange Majority Groupers walking up and offering helpful information than he is.

  And then it comes to him. “Apples!” Alan nearly shouts. “We have fresh apples.”

  Several heads of waiting passengers turn their way.

  “Well there you go!” The gap between the man’s two front teeth is wide enough that he can surely get a unique and deep whistle out of them. “If they truly are fresh, just name your price.”

  After a few brief negotiations, they make the trade.

  “Enjoy Western City North, my friends.” His smile is like a dog’s—big and droopy. “That place is wild.”

  It’s been twenty-two hours since the bus left Southwest Sector. Shouldn’t take this long, a lady with twins and a toddler turns to tell them. All these damn stops, she mutters.

  In the seat next to him, Gad seizes large clumps of his own hair while tapping his foot against the floor.

  “Get it together,” Alan hisses. “You already look guilty of something.”

  A chain of drunken Homeland sailors in khaki uniforms files onto the bus in Village 82. They sing songs Alan doesn’t know, and the babies on the bus cry even harder.

  “You!” A drunken sailor points at Alan. “Soon you’ll know these songs.”

  “Maybe,” another sailor slurs. “But maybe not. Some of these kids still slip through.”

  “Not him.” Talking about Alan as if he isn’t there. “Look at him. Homeland Indigenous. They all serve, every last one of them.”

  In Western Town R, Alan and Gad exit the bus to wait for their transfer, the final leg of the journey before Western City North. People buzz around, angry; the lounge of the small depot is packed, the articulated movement of a stumble ten people away sends waves through the rest of the crowd moments later. The air is heavy, and Alan finds it harder to breathe than he’d like. Gad still has questions for him, sure, but they succumb, momentarily at least, to the need for elbow room. Too many people in one small space. Alan grabs the arm of a thin woman next to him and asks her to explain the unfolding crowds surrounding them.

  “Are you single?” she asks.

  She must be twice his age, older than his mother. “I ship out tomorrow,” he says. He counts on the fact that she is looking for more than one night’s companionship. By her frown, he can see he is right.

  Almost three feet of snow over Mountain Range J29, she sighs. Everything is backed up. No buses in, and no buses out.

  A smile slides across Alan’s face. By now the School has surely sent forth some hired lackey who likes to treat kids with a strong hand and is willing to track them down for just a few Currencies and the fun of beating on some Homeland Indigenous kids. And though that someone is coming, the two of them have a head start. The snow in some distant place has given them time.

  “What about you?” the old woman says to Gad. “You got yourself a lady?”

  The snack bar has oranges, but they’re six times the cost of a small loaf of bread. Gad and Alan spend the last of their Currencies and split the bread in two. Hours pass. A weary voice comes over the loudspeaker: There are no buses in the depot, the voice says. Please do not approach the window; the buses will come when the roads open. A pause, followed by one last beleaguered crackle: We have no idea when the roads will open.

  The crowd buzzes, one step away from a stampede. Misery and anger are packed in tight, a mental unity so strong that Alan thinks they all might rush the ticket window, light a fire, rip some chairs from their bolts, no planning necessary. We all hate each other, Alan realizes, but we all want to leave this place. At this point, a power outage would be catastrophic, unbearable; they need their light. More people want to sit than there are seats. A young man with a nasty cut on his face has a portable radio. At first, the only sounds it throws out are tinny squeals and muffled buzzes. Finally he adjusts the dial, and a voice comes through. The man whose radio it is smiles and starts to speak, but people tell him to shut up and crank the volume. A blizzard in some distant place finally moves the way it should, and people start to cheer. Moments later, a faraway summit is deemed passable, and the crowd erupts again. But in the depot, no announcements are made; the loudspeaker remains silent. A few people approach the window anyway. There are no buses anywhere. The only information they return with is that no one else shoul
d approach the window.

  Gad goes to wait in line for the bathroom, tells Alan he’ll be back.

  “Hey!”

  Alan looks up and sees a man around his age with close-cropped military hair. The man is tall, and the upper half of his face is blotched and sticky looking.

  “Hey, yourself,” says Alan, hoping he has struck the right tone of casual. The man’s eyes look wet and desperate.

  “You need ID?”

  Alan says nothing. People around them jostle and elbow for more space.

  “ID. Papers, man.” He is whispering.

  “I don’t know,” Alan says, whispering back. If I do need ID, Alan thinks, I should be the kind of person who knows I need it.

  “Either way, seventy Currencies and I’ll get you good papers in an hour. You got time. No one here is going anywhere.”

  “I don’t have seventy Currencies.”

  “Sixty.”

  “I don’t have that, either.”

  “C’mon, kid. Fifty-five. That’s my lowest. What are you, Homeland Indigenous?”

  “I have eleven Currencies. And yes.”

  “Eleven Currencies? That’s all you got? Well, it will be a good thing when the Registry gets you. At least you’ll get some clean clothes and a hot meal.” He shakes his head, a small smile on his lips. “Homeland Indigenous, eh? Why not become something else with one of my papers. Minority Group C, maybe. There are no quotas for Cs.”

  “What are you, crazy? I can’t pass for C.”

  “Not my problem,” the man shrugs.

  “How do you know about the quotas?”

  “You ever seen a Homeland Indigenous who is eligible not serve? I don’t know anything about any quotas, I’ve just been paying attention.” The man shrugs again. “So look, let’s talk Currencies. I’m open to negotiations, bartering, that sort of thing. You gotten your greetings yet?”

  “My greetings?” Alan pauses. And then, in between the silence, a new voice rushes in and hooks his arm, this new voice answering the question that is meant for him.

  “Nope. Haven’t gotten those greetings yet, right, honey?”

  Artlessly, he looks at the woman who has grabbed him, who is pulling him away from the man with the papers. He opens his mouth to ask who she is.

  “Just shut up for a second, will you?” she hisses. Her eyes are wide and knowing, and he estimates that—in a good way—these knowing eyes occupy far more real estate on her face than that of the average woman. She pulls him into an unoccupied corner of the station. “That guy is setting you up. He’s a Reggie for sure.”

  “A Reggie?”

  “Undercover agent for the Registry. You’ve never heard that term? Where are you from?”

  “How do you know he’s undercover?”

  “How don’t you know? Walk slowly. Just follow me, okay?”

  Alan’s eyes again trace the outline of her face. She’s not full-on Majority Group. No, she’s a halfie, he thinks, almost positive. There were a few untouchable girls like this at school, alpha women who struck blows in every passing boy’s heart, some Homeland Indigenous grandparent who entered the bloodline long ago only to rise in certain members of their Majority Group descendants, but with enough subtlety to register only the softest projection of difference.

  Gripping his arm, she angles the two of them back into the waiting crowds of the bus station, slipping them away from the Reggie. Alan can see that she is somewhere around his age. After treating himself to a brief stare, he can also see that she is very, very beautiful.

  Her name is Terry, she tells him, her family owned the smallest mansion on an Eastern Sector block of very large ones, and yes, her grandfather was Homeland Indigenous, Group T, or maybe P, she can’t quite remember right now. She has dropped out of a three-digit university and left the hollow-hearted people she came from to find, she tells him, the real.

  “The what?” he asks, just to make sure he has heard her correctly.

  They sit on a somehow unoccupied corner bench of the still crowded depot. However long that line for the bathroom Gad is in, Alan finds himself wishing it longer.

  He likes, he decides, the bones of her face, the curve of her cheeks, the slope of her forehead. An idea presses itself forward. “You know,” Alan tells her, drawing directly from the pages of Tiny Rock, “I can teach you the ways of my people.” Though his ethics and morals threaten suicide as these words leave his mouth, the rest of his body—the part that wants to fuck her in some wayward stall of this crowded bus station—cheers these empty words on. He leans back to gauge her reaction and finds himself gazing at her beautiful hands and feet.

  Terry bursts into laughter. “Seriously? I may not know what the real is, but I know that you don’t believe what you just said any more than I do.” She has the confidence, Alan sees, of someone who has sat across from any number of slavering men.

  He nods shamefully and admits the source of his inspiration. Terry launches into a lecture, learned, apparently, at that three-digit university, about how the author of Tiny Rock took a false name, sold his book as a meditation on some slice of Indigenous life, and cemented his way into libraries and classrooms throughout the country. Plus, she says, the author is a huge proponent of expanding the war, just one final surge, and if sixteen-year-olds are what it takes—

  “So he’s not Homeland Indigenous?” Alan asks.

  “Once we thought he was,” Terry says, “and now we know he’s not.”

  “Oh.”

  “Does that matter to you?” she asks.

  Alan shakes his head. “I just thought it was a pretty shitty book.”

  She opens her mouth wide and laughs again, a small seed revealing itself between her two front teeth. Her neck is a smooth maze of soft lines. Even the smallest bones within him are terrified. She is that beautiful.

  As the conversation floats on—a perfect admixture of jokes, insights, damages sustained, influences, and the beliefs that shape them—Alan realizes that this is the longest conversation he has ever had with a woman. Gone for now are thoughts of some mercenary sent to chase him, his lack of Currencies, the unknown location of his next night’s sleep, his doubts about his ability to find the baldheads and pass their test so he can be introduced to Woody Gilbert. Those distant worries are not a stunning woman with a small seed in her teeth, sitting next to him.

  Around him, people begin to cheer. The Expressway has been reopened, the loudspeaker rumbles. Please approach the window if you need to make new travel arrangements.

  “I have to ask,” she says, “or to warn you, really.”

  A convoy of buses pulls into the station.

  “Are you going? Has the Registry gotten to you?”

  Now boarding.

  “Sorry, that’s my bus. Now answer my question.”

  He wonders whether this might be some sort of test, so he says nothing.

  She shows a joyful blaze of teeth, her cheeks rising into her eyes. “Good,” she says. “Never reveal your status to anyone.” She places a hand on his shoulder. “The quotas, the one hundred percent conscription rate for Homeland Indigenous that everyone talks about? They’re reading the wrong papers. It’s not real.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You still have a chance—”

  Now boarding.

  “I have a plan,” Alan hears himself say. “Hiding isn’t something I want to do. In fact”—he can feel the fire within himself now—“I want to make them hide from me.”

  She mumbles something about male ego that he doesn’t quite catch.

  “Have you ever been to Western City North?” he asks. “Do you know about the baldheads?”

  She snorts and tells him that she has just come from there, that she has seen plenty of baldheads around town and that all they do is play some strange psychological game. “They can’t get you out of war,” she tells him. “You need to prioritize. So keep this in mind: the quotas are a trick. They just want you to think it’s inevitable. Those are dirty
papers that report on that, government funded.” She reaches out to touch him, her soft fingers landing on his wrist. “But don’t get caught up in anything stupid. You’re a person, you’re not a group, understand? The only change that violence brings is to create a more violent world.”

  He understands that she is warning him against HIM, against the ideas put forth by the pamphlets he has hidden in his now swelling pants. But what does she know? Of course she’d say the baldheads just play games; curing addicts was their cover. Sure, she is beautiful, but her beauty hasn’t led her to the information on the crushed paper folded into small squares and now resting just below his backbone. She thinks that the baldheads are just some cult of wackos. Which means that she doesn’t understand that for real freedom, you need to sink below. Not that her inability to comprehend makes her any less attractive. He would like to kiss her stomach, behind her ears, the back of her neck. He decides to give it a try.

  “You must be kidding,” she says.

  Now boarding. Now boarding.

  “Fine,” he tells her. “Your loss.”

  With a tight smile, she reminds him to always keep his Registry status to himself. If someone does ask, make sure to—

  Last call for boarding. Final call.

  “Whatever,” he says, standing up. “I can take care of myself.”

  With the buses once again running, the crowds around him have thinned. Still, the bathroom line must have been insane. Navigating his way through the remaining crowd, he is already weaving together for Gad the story of how he has kissed a girl. He knows that if another person believes the new facts now forming on the edge of his mouth, they will in some way become true.

  He arrives at the bathroom. There is no line; every stall is empty. The depot buzzes with people, but Gad is not among them.

  Alan leans against a small piece of wall. Back at the School, he had watched over Gad’s shoulder as he filled out the Registry form: Name and Address of Person Who Will Always Know Your Address. Gad had printed Alan’s name, and Alan had done the same. Alan looks around for Gad. But Gad isn’t anywhere.