This Is the Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lance was, Joe wished he would head back indoors. He too had a bag to carry out, a life to leave behind.

    Joe caught a ride across the bridge to a student co-op in a small college town. The next two nights he spent in a wall closet, a pile of clothes stuffed into a pillowcase under his head. That night, he dreamed of a soundless Benny, gesturing to him wildly, unable to speak, further details slipping away the moment he woke. On Friday, as planned, Joe went back to the Blue Unicorn and waited for Benny to show.
    As Joe sat in the café, an emptiness skidded across his stomach, and he sneaked small bites of forgotten food when no one was looking: stale bread, hard cheese, salted beef. A full day of waiting, and still no Benny. Normally, Joe liked to be alone, needed it even. Most people drained him or filled him with a profound sadness that human interaction was, by definition, such a chore. But not Benny. Around Benny, his gloom was swept away. Benny recharged him.
    After hours of waiting, Joe hitchhiked back across the bridge to the co-op. It was an old building with an apexed roof that dropped shingles onto the front yard at menacing speeds. Inside, the hallways were lined with paint streaks and posters offering discredited or fanciful explanations of official versions of events. Every door was closed, but from behind each one escaped loud, thudding music, the scratches and wobbles of banged instruments shifting at an ever-changing tempo. These days in the Homeland, there were only two types of music: clanging songs of war or the sad, slow tones of women who wept alone.
    There were so many people in and out of the co-op that no one gave Joe any trouble. Women and vets, for the most part, a few of them Substance dealers, none of them with any idea of who was lost and wandering and who actually belonged. A few of the dealers had approached him, but Joe turned them down. He knew Benny messed around with Substance Q occasionally, but it was clear that these folks were slinging new derivatives that were much more extreme.
    That evening, Joe called his parents collect. He knew they would want to hear from him, and besides, maybe they had some information he could use. His mother yelped when she heard him on the end of the line.
    “Calm down, Ma,” Joe said.
    “Where are you?” His mother always began conversations like this.
    He told her he was at a co-op for college kids, and she began to cry. “Are you going to church?” his mother sniffed. “Tell me you go. I do hope you’re going, Joe. I really do.”
    A bone-thin man without a shirt walked by and blinked his eyes in Joe’s direction a few too many times. Joe let his eyes pass over the man’s thin limbs and sunken chest, noting his missing ear and scarred torso. “Look, Ma, this is collect. Don’t you want to call me back?”
    A debate broke out between his mother and father over which was more expensive: a collect call or a long distance one. After a few moments of letting them argue, he shouted the co-op’s number over their voices and hung up. The shirtless man walked past again. A small gust of desire drifted into Joe’s chest, but he stamped it out quickly. There were no friendly faces in this strange place. Besides, the man in front of him had some sort of problem.
    “What?” Joe asked the man.
    With a slim finger, the man pointed to the phone.
    “I’m waiting for a call,” Joe said.
    The man’s face got tight, but he kept quiet. He took a cross-legged seat on the floor, folded up at Joe’s feet. Eyes closed and breaths slow and troubled, the man seemed to be shutting out all external stimuli. Finally the phone rang again, Joe’s parents already midargument the moment he picked up. His father’s hearing had begun to fade; each word was initiated with an excess of volume. He heard his father grunt something to his mother about telling him now . Not yet, the pitted voice of his mother said. Whatever his father thought he should know was put on hold;