This Is the Night (14 page)

What did this baby-leader know? What kind of training had he had in order to make his evaluation? “I had bugs,” Lorrie told the group leader, “not shame.” Saying she
had
bugs in the past tense seemed faintly healing. Just then a trail of flat-bodied arthropods scuttled across the knuckles of her left hand, their tiny segmented bodies following one after another, antennae first. Day-bugs. Much more manageable. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists, and did her best not to scream.

A few people in the circle shook their heads, saddened at her resistance.

“Wrong,” the baby-leader said. “You had bugs because you were ashamed of something. You shut that life of shame away, locked it up tight in a box, and stuffed it beneath your feathery little mattress.” The baby-leader crossed his legs and then uncrossed them. “Now it comes out as bugs instead.”

“Exactly,” nodded the crying woman.

“So true,” said a barely teenaged boy on his fourth suicide attempt.

“Wild,” said the artist who had skinned himself with a paring knife.

“How exactly do you mean?” Lorrie asked. She felt an awful tingle below her skin.

The next morning, the uniformed man with the rimless glasses woke her at first light. Again the two of them began the same routine as the day before.

“Pills?” he said, pushing the low cup in her face.

She watched him. This was a test, his attempt to see if a full day and night in the Facility had broken her. “Pills,” Lorrie answered. Let him win today, she decided. Give him the feeling that he’s in control.

The uniformed man smirked.

That control he felt, Lorrie knew, was the emptiest of all emotions. She was a wind-torn cloud, and this simple man in uniform would not be able to grasp her.

Through the window, Lorrie watched a rise of air shake the branches of a small, scaly tree. The Facility was meant to operate on a loop, she realized. The sooner she accepted her place in the wheel, the easier it would be for the people who wanted to turn it. Without resistance, each day would be the same.

Swinging her legs over the bed, she pressed the undersides of her feet against the cool grey-green tile. A small red bug made quick slaloms between the crevices of her toes. But one little day-bug was nothing. And why should it be? Every day would be what this day was: more pills, more bugs, more shame, and more of the Young Savior.

Only, today was different. The baby-leader directed the group away from shame, away from the Young Savior, and toward, he said, the few things in their lives worth feeling good about. Lorrie studied him, eager to make sense of his mismatched jumble of parts.

“What do you
care
about?” he asked the circle. “What do you do, what
can
you do, that when you do it you feel as though you could have been doing it all your life?”

Lorrie leaned over to itch her elbow.
So much doing,
she thought. What she needed to do was get the hell out of this haunted countryside and back to civilization. The war was still raging, right now, in this very moment. Didn’t these people understand?

“Lorrie?” the baby-leader asked. “How about you?”

“The fight for justice!” she yelled. “Answers from our leaders! Freedom!”

Standing up, the baby-leader hobbled toward her, raising his voice. “Those are just words, and those particular words don’t mean anything here. Freedom, how? Justice, why?” The baby-leader loomed over her, waiting for a response.

Every skin-grazing bug on her body froze as though under a spell. Perhaps they, too, wanted to listen.

“So tell me, what are you talking about, Lorrie?” the baby-leader yelled down to her. Spittle poured from his mouth and drilled against the top of her head. “Say something real! What do you
mean
?”

A silence fell over the room. The day-bugs paused from engaging in their frantic scratches; the speechless vet pressed his slender fingers together and rested his nose on his fleshy fists. The crying oatmeal lady cupped both hands over her heart. The peeled-skin artist pushed his tongue against his cheek, thoughtful. The baby-leader was waiting, the talk group was waiting, the bugs were waiting, and most of all, Lorrie was waiting, too.

Closing her eyes, she felt the broken people of the talk group shoot the breath of life right into her. The shock of realization was instantaneous. How long, she wondered, had her focus been so diffuse? Years of work, and all of it for nothing. The answer entered her, bouncing around her insides. Of course. She could not stop the war. No more sniffing aimlessly around its edges; it was too big, too powerful. But she could, at least on a small scale, stop the suffering. And so it was clear. Forget the war. Find a way to save the men, one by one by one.

“Anything?” the baby-leader asked.

“Nope,” she said. Not all truths are for sharing.

Even so, everyone in her circle was a witness. Even so, they still scared her, the members of the talk group. When they smiled, their grins looked hideous, the muscles deeply rusted and out of practice. Only the artist with the peeled skin, the man in black, had features that approached a level of balance and normalcy. He appeared by her bed that night after curfew. They sneaked off to the roof.

The tar and gravel cut into Lorrie’s back uncomfortably. Though Lorrie knew the artist was marked, had scarred himself, in the darkness she could only see the outlines of his body, none of the details. The artist was a blur, and she lay back and watched as he put a leg on either side of her. His bottom rested on the lower part of her belly. After a moment, he stood up.

The artist seemed nervous. His thin chest heaved and shook, and he began to undress her as though he were following the steps of a manual. Shoes first. Left sock, then the other, the zipper of her pants, followed by the button, both hands pulling down slowly, methodically. He was not Lance, and she pushed out all thoughts of the pure, sloppy joy the two of them had once shared. Where was Lance now? Had the Registry gotten to him? A lone night-bug emerged from the underpart of her thigh and shuffled aimlessly into the night as the artist tossed her jeans aside. There was no urgency to the way the artist removed her clothes. Maybe, she thought, his passion had been all used up when he skinned himself.

“Take off your shirt,” Lorrie called up to him.

He paused.

“Now,” she said.

The artist gripped his collar with both hands and lifted his shirt over his head in a single, smooth movement. The light was dim, but she reached her hands up and placed them on his belly, on his chest. Small, prickly bumps of raised tissue met the tips of her fingers. Long vertical lines like tiny corduroy wales ran from the base of his collarbone to the bottom of his ribs. His chest was hairless, but her fingers could feel everything: he had not left one part of his torso unpeeled.

“Please,” breathed the artist, his neck arced. Wisps of steam rose from his nostrils and circled in the air: a fragrant mix of fear and pain and other ingredients she couldn’t identify.

Her fingers ran over the vertical ridges of his chest. “You did this for art?” she asked him in a whisper.

“Yes.” He opened his eyes and looked down at her.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“For art?”

He was quiet.

“Not for the war? Not to escape it?”

He placed both hands in a triangle in front of his nose. “Yes,” he said.

Clouds blocked most of the moon, though a thin strip of grey light cut through to shine on the artist’s face. He leaned forward, the creases in his belly folding over one another to make long, horizontal lines that ran from one hip to the other. Lorrie poked a finger inside one of the folds. There, in that small, warm space where skin doubled over skin, she found a pristine patch of smoothness, the one part of his body he had left untouched.

Clouds moved, bright dots of light made slow arcs across the sky, and Lorrie let her head fall back. The artist leaned forward, his legs froglike, splayed to the side and fully covering her. Each of his breaths was hot and labored, and he burrowed his face into her neck. They did not kiss. Lorrie waited, not knowing quite what she was waiting for. The artist lay there, softly crushing her. Suddenly, without warning, he lifted his head, stretched back his neck, and from deep within, the artist released a sad, strange howl of wordless words, less-than-human babbles that sailed up to the highest points of the dark sky above.

After a few minutes, he sat up, still on top of her. The artist studied her face. Perhaps he thought that his howl showed evidence of some deep hell overcome. Maybe, Lorrie thought, he was just looking to see whether she’d still have sex with him.

The artist shifted down her body, placed his hands on her hips, gripped the fabric of her underwear in two tight fists, and tugged downward. Before Lorrie knew what was happening, the artist had buried his face between her thighs. A loud pop leapt into her brain, and she stretched her eyes wide open in the half darkness as the questions piled up:
What am I doing? Who is this man?
She had not prepared for this, had not tamed, shaped, showered, and groomed in the ways she wanted, and now a strange man with shaved skin and a beaked nose had his parted lips on her, in her, all over her, spreading her as though she were in an exam room, panting and slurping and lapping in her general direction with a stretched tongue as though he were some starved hunter-gatherer who had just had his first kill in days. The artist licked her in all the wrong places, he was off-key, too ravenous; he plunged, dived, and explored erratically when all she wanted was a slow sense of rhythm. Lorrie wondered if his tongue was staggering away from her in some sort of subtle protest. But no. Two showers, she told herself, she had taken two showers that day, one early in the morning, another after the difficult talk group in the late afternoon. The hot water had left her during the second shower; war years, Lorrie knew, meant that any warmth in the water at all was a lucky break. The problem, she saw, wasn’t with her at all.

“Wait,” she told him.

The artist looked up, cheeks glistening, and under the big night moon, Lorrie saw his tiny eyes.

“Go slow,” she said. “Much slower.”

As she watched the scarred man in the blue light do his best to let her feel something, Lorrie told herself that these were certainly war years. Her eyelids shut, the artist slowed down. She had hoped that the artist might help her escape, if only for a moment, from the rhythm of her thoughts and the drab, inner scolding of her mind. Insects that were not in her head buzzed around her ears, and Lorrie allowed herself to surrender into his touch.

His touch was nothing special.

All his intensity had been howled out, she saw, maybe by his failed art, maybe by his fear of war. Whatever it was, it had eaten up all he had. The artist had been emptied. There was no way this hollow man could empty her, not even for a moment.

Even so, it had been too long since she’d been touched, and though the artist was mechanical, he was warm, he was a person, he was the first contact with her skin that was not from a bug but an actual human being. Her first caress after a million years spent alone.

With both hands Lorrie reached down, grabbed his ears, and pulled him up. Once the artist was inside her, she laid her head back and looked at the stars. A deep breath, a gaze at the moon, at the small points of light that dotted the sky, the grunts of the artist in her ear. A real person, she thought, a good, though damaged person, was touching her. The artist placed a hand on her face that blocked her view, so she gave a sharp bite to his finger, and once again, Lorrie could see the stars. The slowly turning sounds of night swept across her eardrums while bright red spots laced and twisted themselves in front of her eyes. Lorrie felt sure these small, moonlit moments were the gateway to a less poisonous season of life that lay ahead. Finally, as the artist continued to unroll himself into her, a welcome emptiness took over. A perfect nothingness. But then, he was finished. She kissed him good-bye and tiptoed down to bed. That night was her first without bugs, her only invasion-free sleep in months. Her dreams were empty, and she loved it. The day had not been the same after all.