Read This Is the Night for Free Online

she had more to ask him: Where are you, how are you doing, and what is it that you think you are doing wherever you are?
    Well, Joe thought about telling them, there’s a one-eared cross-legged man with piped veins and heavy breaths folded at my feet. “It’s my turn now,” he heard his father say. An involuntary clutch pressed into Joe’s back and thrust his spine straight. Even though it had been two years since Joe had been under his roof, the voice of his father still whipped his skin; each sound he spoke birthed tiny welts in the center of Joe’s chest.
    “They came in person, Joe. The Registry. Showed up at our door at dinnertime.”
    Joe said nothing. The cross-legged man lifted his head and looked up at him. As their eyes met, the man unfurled his palm to reveal a fiery flash of red. It was a crumpled peony; Joe recognized the flower from his mother’s garden. What he meant by it, Joe had no idea.
    “‘Three notices,’ they said. Three notices you ignored. Scared the heck out of your mother.”
    “Tell her I’m sorry about that.” Below him, the bright red petals of the peony lay flat on the cross-legged man’s upturned palm. Maybe he was one of those vets Joe had heard about: stable on the surface, but saddled with an inner world of deluded landscapes and bristling misconceptions. Unless the flower was some sort of signal. But Joe’s father was still talking: notices ignored, official documents, last chances.
    “You can’t ignore the Registry, Joe.”
    For once, his father was right. So many years into the war, the Homeland was getting desperate and the Registry more vicious.
    Joe’s eyes needed to rest themselves on something that wasn’t unfolding into madness. Tacked on the wall in front of him was a piece of newsprint with the headline Secret Reggies , followed by small photographs of half a dozen men. Joe squinted at the tacked-up newsprint to try and make out what and who they were.
    “It’s not a game, Joe,” his father was saying. “Twenty-two years now, these guys know what they’re doing, how to get you.”
    Below the bolded Secret Reggies was a small, italicized explanation: A Gallery of Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. Undercover Registry agents, the article explained, posing as wildhairs, as normal citizens, as drug dealers and criminals. The agents, the article said, were everywhere. The largest photograph was of a man said to be operating locally. He had sloped shoulders and curly hair and wore a fringed vest.
    Joe stared at the pictures.
    None of those men , he thought, look any different from me.
    “You know what they told me?” his father was saying. “They said, ‘tell your boy that even if he’s too chickenshit, that’s not how you go about it. Tell him you don’t ignore.’”
    “Got it.” You used to be able to ignore, Joe thought. But no, the Homeland had been fighting for long enough that no one was slipping through.
    “You go, you cough, you let them grab your balls, and then you see what happens.”
    “Is that them saying that or you?”
    “Does it matter?”
    The cross-legged man rose to his feet. We’re the same height; our eyes are completely level, Joe thought. The two of them pushed their stares toward one another, and Joe could tell from the shrunken pupils across from him that this man had a raw edge that was ten worlds away from him. Were they done playing make-believe? Just as Joe was about to point to a spare closet he had seen with a lock on the door, the man leaned forward.
    “History is a nightmare,” he whispered in Joe’s ear.
    “What’s that? Speak up, Joe, I can’t hear you,” yelled his father into the phone. “I can’t make out a word you’re saying.”
    All the signs had been wrong. Perhaps Joe was still too new at playing the game; he had let his eyes linger too long on the man’s childish limbs, his corduroyed thighs. Too much enthusiasm drizzling and oozing out of him like a lost puppy. The man let out a high-pitched sneeze