This Is the Night (7 page)

4.

Western City North was a town of firsts for Lance and Lorrie. In their new apartment the two of them ate new foods and tried new positions for their new lives: oysters; draped over the bathtub
—
the cool porcelain an awful shock against warm skin
;
a rare and fresh kiwi that a radiant older woman had handed to Lance on his way to work; Lance standing while Lorrie remained seated on the tiled kitchen counter, legs on his shoulders; fresh cherries and bright blueberries, together almost half a month’s rent, followed by some twisted maneuver that neither of them enjoyed called the pinwheel. Soon, with fresh fruit and quality produce scarce even in the fertile soil surrounding Western City North, their bodies were all they had left. Gone were the stone fruits, berries, and salad greens. Remaining was each other, clenched legs, crossed ankles, and all. Even when all that was affordable were sweetgrass stews and tough meats, they were still a couple possessed, marvelously fucking each night until the first hints of sunlight crept through the blinds.

On his eighteenth birthday, Lance mailed his card to the Registry. It was mandated—every man had to—but as a small act of defiance, he gave his address back home instead of his smoky Western City North apartment next door to the family of Neutral Country Ps. As expected, Lance heard nothing back. And while the Registry was silent, everything else around him began to crumble.

First, one of them itched. The next day both of them did. They went to a free clinic, waiting for half the day while men with facial wounds and rare fungal diseases received their care. Finally a nurse practitioner hustled them into an exam room, smiled at what were surely her first patients of the day whose damage did not come from combat, and handed them a topical cream.

Once home, Lance and Lorrie followed the tiny directions on the little tube, even made a game out of it as they applied the cold cream to their ragged skin.

Two days later, Lorrie still itched.

“Don’t worry,” Lance said. “Give it a few more days.”

A few days were followed by a few more, and Lorrie’s itching did not subside.

She rubbed the cream into her skin. She still itched. She rubbed more cream, mangling the tube into spilling its final few drops.

“There isn’t anything,” Lance said. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Please.” The knurled tendons in her neck rose into a ridged surface that pressed against the skin. “Just check one more time.”

And for her, Lance would move around skin, squint his eyes, and look for the lice that almost certainly weren’t there.

Lorrie became increasingly distressed and spoke only of contamination, infestation. The lice were on the move, migrating, she claimed, and had now voyaged out from her pubic hair and onto the rest of her body. When Lance protested they were called pubic lice for a reason, warm tears slid from the corners of Lorrie’s eyes onto the sheets below. Her nose, which was long and pointed, was almost always clogged from constant wailing. They didn’t discuss where the lice had come from; that wasn’t a conversation either of them wanted. Lorrie recognized, of course, the aspects of Lance—the slashing eyes? The bone-crushing stare? The glaring absence of men in the city that caused women to gulp and place a soft hand on their rabbit-hearted chests?—but her focus was not on some imagined desertion on Lance’s part, but rather the muffled annoyance that the bugs that had been rubbed out with one topical cream for Lance seemed to have converted in Lorrie to something else entirely.

“I know they’re there,” she sobbed. “Just look again. Just find something.”

And so Lorrie continued to scratch. She thumbed through the phone book for laundromats. When she reached them, she would demand to the befuddled voice on the other end of the line that they recite the highest temperatures—no rounding digits, please—that their washing machines could reach. Once, then twice a week, she stuffed their bedding into large cotton bags, pulled them tight with a string, and dragged them over her shoulder and onto the bus in search of a scalding heat that would destroy the invisible colonies she was convinced had taken up residence on her clothes and body.

Each day she scratched harder. Her fingernails upended her skin, tore apart cyte and cell, transfiguring them into open sores that pocked the surface of her face.

In some ways, it was ridiculous.
You’re doing this to yourself,
Lance wanted to tell her.
This is a problem of the mind, not the body.
His thoughts took violent turns, and in his dreams he lashed out at her, his nighttime self grabbing Lorrie’s arms and shaking her as he spoke, each word slower than the last:
Just. Stop. Scratching.

Lance knew he only had a few hours to act while Lorrie was out. She was an active member of a group that helped organize free breakfasts for crippled veterans. However, the leadership of the small group had fractured as the vice president and her undersecretary had drafted a mission statement calling for an investigation into the flaked and fabled Foreign substance known as Fareon.
With a foundational shift in the age and makeup of our government
,
they wrote,
our nonagenarian prime minister in particular, we hereby advocate for a full investigation into our leaders and their association with this material
. Or, as Lorrie put it to Lance: Why the hell were just a handful of the Homeland’s leadership growing so old but staying so healthy?

Proof? There was none, raged the counterargument, not a dab, a splash, nor a splatter, nothing besides the ages of the prime minister and his closest allies, no serious evidence that some obscure mineral deep in the Foreign jungles could make anyone live longer, and even less proof that a small, shadowy cabal of handpicked legislators had this wonder potion at their disposal. Skeptics shook their heads sadly. How can we make these Fareon people see? they asked. There’s no documentation, no evidence. None at all.

Exactly, came the response. They’re that crafty.

Last week, the president of the organization to which Lorrie had devoted so much time had called an emergency meeting on the Fareon question. Outside, Registry agents intercepted groups of attendees and questioned them about two recent attacks, one where a bomb exploded, the other where it did not. Men were pulled aside, their papers checked.

An agent with cloudy cataracts and a limp—afflictions of war Lorrie was well acquainted with—stopped Lorrie on her way in and ran down a list of queries from his clipboard. From the wild cartwheeling of his questions, it was clear the authorities had no leads on anything.

“You guys think Homeland Indigenous are tossing bombs around?” Lorrie asked a Reggie. “That’s a new one.” She shook her head and headed inside.

The meeting did not go well. With the Registry having snapped up almost all the male membership, the remaining men made it clear they felt outnumbered and voiceless, though their feelings of estrangement were by no means exclusive. Divisions in the group fell less along the lines of sex and far more across the monstered lake of thoughts and feelings. Shouts and scuffles broke out repeatedly. Believers in the explanatory logic of Fareon as the clear answer to the prime minister’s advanced age were baffled by the accusations of insufficient evidence, each speaker more frustrated than the next that their comrades could not see the hidden forces operating just beneath the surface. On the opposing side, the anti-Fareon contingent sat with arms folded, incredulous that an inability to end the war had now transmogrified into fanciful tales of all-powerful forces operating under shadowy rules that subverted the laws of nature and reason. There’s so much more to actually fight against, things that are real, they argued.

What could be more real than a substance that won’t let you die? came the retort.

In a shaky voice, the vice president of the organization read from a speech that one of the few female legislators, a Coyote, had given on the parliament floor. This particular legislator had spent years raging against the war. Members of Lorrie’s group rolled their eyes. None of these people needed a civics lesson; all of them had witnessed the unfolding of what was now their hellish present. Upon completion of his second six-year term, the prime minister had run again, this time as deputy prime minister, second in command. The years that followed saw the timid man supposedly in charge push that fateful word “consecutive” into the Constitution, and soon, the prime minister was eligible to run yet again. Which he did. Repeatedly. As the prime minister’s political structure hardened, antiwar legislators became increasingly rare. Now, after twenty-two years of banging on podiums, the name had stuck. Coyotes they were called. Because they may as well have been howling at the moon.

Over the jeers and hoots of the audience, the vice president of the organization continued to read the legislator’s speech. Though the group couldn’t even manage to get along well enough to keep serving breakfast to a few hungry vets, Lorrie still hoped to unify the factions.

“Check me one more time,” Lorrie had said before the meeting. “Just once more.”

Even though he knew there would be nothing to find, Lance still recognized that this nothing was feasting on the last scraps of the woman he loved. He looked some more.

Nothing. Lorrie and her scabs left for the meeting. The moment she closed the door, Lance called the exterminators.

“This really isn’t standard operating procedure,” the first exterminator said. The men in front of him were dressed in dark work overalls and leather utility belts stocked with tools Lance didn’t recognize. Both men were too old for the Registry, had probably served during the much tamer early years of the current conflict. One of the men had his coveralls zipped all the way to his neck, while the other had allowed his zipper to fall to the middle of his chest, revealing the coffee stains of his white undershirt. Behind them stood a much younger woman, also in dark coveralls, a notepad and pen in her hand.

“Our intern,” said Unzipped, cricking his neck in her direction. “Not enough fellas like yourself to do the job these days.”

“But back to this one,” said Zipped-Up. “We don’t do fakes. We’re real. We kill termites. We run your carpet beetles out of the house. We zap your pests, and for a much more reasonable price than our competitors.” The intern wrinkled her forehead and made a few quick scribbles on her notepad.