Read Online This Is the Night by Jonah C. Sirott - Free Book Online Page A

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