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

weird?”
    “That this old man can make us do whatever he wants.”
    “I think it’s a little more complicated than that.”
    “I mean, what is he, ninety? Ninety-five? If some random old guy came up to us right now and was, like, ‘pour your coffee on the floor,’ you’d just say no. But because it’s this old guy in particular . . .”
    Joe shrugged. The only way to believe that the prime minister’s age was an issue was to read the underground papers, and neither of them had bothered to do it. “Do you think it’s our fault?” he asked Benny. “Do you think we should have known more? Read more papers or something?”
    “Are you serious? First off, even if you could do it all over again, you still wouldn’t watch the news or read the papers. There’s so many of them, it’s impossible to choose what information to pay attention to. And when you do listen, it’s completely demoralizing. Second”—Benny was smiling now—“the fact that there’s way too much news does nothing to change the other fact that every paper, every program just says the same thing over and over again. It’s a simple equation. Big paper equals: the war is going well—”
    “But watch out for terrorists at home,” added Joe.
    “Right. And for the smaller papers, it’s even simpler: the war is wrong.”
    “Plus a sympathetic little box in the corner for the latest round of domestic crap.”
    “Totally. ‘Small Bomb Dents Registry Truck.’”
    “‘Foreign Sleeper Cell or Domestic Sympathizers?’”
    Benny sighed. “Same question. Every damn time.”
    And yet this world Benny was describing was already becoming simple, unfamiliar. Lately, Joe had heard, a new strain of the underground press had emerged, radio stations and newspapers that let facts whip about wildly like an ocean storm. Not only were they fixated on the prime minister’s health at age ninety-six, these new papers also made an issue of his closest associates, many of them in their eighth and ninth decades as well. A result, these papers claimed, of Fareon. How they explained that it was the Foreigns who controlled and maintained the world’s only deposits differed. But beneath the surface, all the claims were similar: Fareon was helping old men feel young. And the only ones who had access to it happened to be the architects of the war.
    Of course, a handful of new radio stations and papers had recently popped up solely to refute these claims. The only thing Joe knew for sure was that the war was absorbing men at astonishing new rates. And here he and Benny were, up next.
    Just a handful of days to figure out his entire everything. The Registry had squirmed its way into Joe’s life, and it seemed that the more he thought about his options, the narrower they became.
    “I’ll track that book down, and we can meet up tonight at my uncle’s cabin,” Benny was saying. “There’s a bus in a few hours for you and one for me a little after.” He sniffed in again. “We’ll lay low for a while, get out of the city. The cabin is completely isolated. It’ll give us some time to think before Tuesday.”
    “Why don’t I just come with you?”
    Benny waved his hand. “I just have to handle a few things first. I’d let you tag along, but you don’t want anything to do with these guys.”
    Joe wondered what kind of guys had books but were dangerous, too. And why split up? Why not just stick together? Benny hacked a syrupy cough into his napkin. “So we go to this cabin—”
    “And we’ll be in this amazing forest, and we can sit and think and maybe forget about all this Registry crap for a minute. Maybe for a hundred minutes.”
    “That’s like an hour and a half.”
    Benny laughed. The laugh was his real one, Joe knew, rare and deep, and to Joe, the sound was as joyful as the jump of a small child into a warm pool.
    In some ways, the plan seemed perfect. Solitude, a completely new setting, just the two of them, a calmness that might lead to the