It is a testament to Alana’s intelligence and insight that, in spite of the what-matters-to-me-most statement that Mother wrote for Orlando and regardless of his extreme awkwardness on their first date, the dear woman discerned the truth of him: his occupation and his unquenchable need for what he calls “action.” When they met, she was two years from being California Teacher of the Year. Because of her beauty and high academic standards, she had become the target of a few students, hormone-crazed fourteen-year-old boys, who had no interest in learning, carried knives, and thought the best way to prove their masculinity was to disrupt her class, torment other students, and openly make lewd suggestions to the teacher. With a keen nose for Alana’s ambition and resentful that she had turned down his romantic advances, the principal provided her with no assistance and failed to punish the miscreants. With her classroom in chaos, she lost hope of grooming her best students to win the academic contests that would bring them and their teacher to the attention of the state education establishment. Without the support of the school administration, she risked acquiring a reputation as a pushover for those students inclined to say, “Piss off, bitch,” rather than “Yes, ma’am.” She began looking for a knightly champion. Four months later, she found Orlando through Enchantment Now.
Not long ago, this had been a country in which fourteen-year-old boys carried penknives instead of switchblades, if they carried any knife at all. Back then, they had never seen pornography other than the comparatively wholesome nudes in Playboy. Beer was their inebriant of choice rather than the smorgasbord of drugs currently available. Once, sociopaths among them were so few that high school shooting rampages were as rare as authentic film of Bigfoot. After decades of rapid progress, it’s not that country anymore.
Some nights, Orlando steps out of his happy home to engage in a session of student counseling, although on most occasions he adds an appointment to his and Masud’s daily enforcement list. Never has a fourteen-year-old boy repeated his boorish behavior in the classroom after he has been accosted by two large men who look as serious as Orlando and Masud. They shove the kid into a van, take him to an abandoned warehouse, strip him naked, zip tie him to a chair, hold a combat knife to his package, and inform him in detail how he will have to urinate for the rest of his life if he doesn’t die from loss of blood. If he is fortunate enough to receive urinary diversion surgery, the flow will fill an exterior collection bag that he’ll need to empty manually. Orlando always concludes the encounter by warning the clueless youth not to speak of this encounter to anyone and be nice to his English teacher, unfailingly nice and obedient, or he won’t get another warning. No second chance. Next time, all his dangling parts will come off, and if ever again he is happy enough to sing, he’ll be an ultra soprano.
Alana has explained to Orlando that he’s not a bad man, not by comparison with so many others in this ever-darker world. Yes, his inebriant of choice is the wine of violence, but he commits violence against those who think no rules should apply to them; therefore, he maintains order in his neighborhood, when he could just as easily unleash violence on the innocent, as so many others do. She says he is a scourge, as Moses in the Bible was a scourge. Scourges provide a service without which civilization cannot exist. Each time she tells him this, she then does him until he’s exhausted. He thinks she is one day going to be an amazing secretary of education.
Now, he wishes that he could be at home, listening to her read a novel, instead of patrolling this lonely highway, and he marvels that he, never having completed ninth grade, could have as his lover such a beautiful, brilliant woman. Having won the love of an angel like Alana, surely he can learn to play the guitar; he might just buy a new one.
A series of rapid rifle shots interrupts Orlando’s reverie. He crouches instinctively, but the rounds aren’t aimed at him. Screams cut through the night, so sharp with pain and terror that it seems flint-thin flashes of light should accompany them as they strop all things in their passage. More shots and dying screams allow him to perceive by intuition and conjecture the location of the action. He draws his SIG P245, leaps across the drainage ditch, and hurries through the rain, the dark, and the trees in their ordered but worthless plenitude.
LIFE YOU MAY EVADE, BUT DEATH YOU SHALL NOT
Michael knows this place to be an enterprise destroyed by officials of great power and no wisdom, ruined by a lack of water and now drowned in a deluge that no effort has been made to channel into reservoirs. Nevertheless, as he sidles between Whole Fruit and Specialty Products, keeping his back to the wall of the former, the structures seem to be more meaningful than mere abandoned buildings of concrete and weatherboard and corrugated steel, like edifices in dreams that are simultaneously as ordinary as office buildings and yet as ominous as temples to gods unknown on Earth.
His eyes are fully dark-adapted. Among the quartet of dead men that he passed a moment earlier, the flashlights lying in the mud and skimming their beams across the puddled water had not to any degree diminished his night sight, for he’d squinted against their influence. Still, the deep gloom doesn’t fully clarify, and he repeatedly freezes at the perception of dark figures that prove to be phantoms.
When he was a very young child, in his fourth and fifth years, he had been afraid of the dark. For some reason that made sense only to his disturbed mother, Beth, she tormented him with her insistence that his father, crushed by a city truck before Michael’s first birthday, had come back from the dead. She said that Lionel, though rotting and crawling with worms, was watching their house at night, eager to grab his son, carry him back to the cemetery, and take him down into the grave, into the coffin out of which he had clawed his way. Your father was a mean and jealous man. He doesn’t want you to smell a flower when he no longer can, resents you enjoying cake when he can’t taste or swallow anything anymore. If you dare go out alone after nightfall, you’ll never see the sunrise again. Perhaps the tapping at a window was a moth drawn to light, and maybe the curious noises on the porch were made by a raccoon exploring as raccoons do, and conceivably the clatter on the roof was a neighbor’s cat chasing a rat, but always Mother knew that it was Lionel testing the window latch, the door lock, the possibility that the chimney might provide an entrance to the house. Too young to understand that his mother was at best mentally ill and, at worst, might enjoy tormenting and manipulating a child into nervous submission, he lived those last two preschool years in her thrall and in a quiet dread of sunset. She lent credence to her rants about the walking dead by paying a locksmith to add two deadbolts to the front door and two to the back, as well as upgrade all the window latches. Every afternoon, prior to nightfall, she took Michael with her on a ritual tour of the house, making sure every lock and latch was engaged. She drew the curtains tight shut to ensure that the envious dead man could not get a glimpse of his son that would intensify his passion for reunion. Young Michael slept with a night-light, and when he woke after midnight, the gathered shadows in this or that corner, or the dark beyond the open closet door, assumed the shape of a man at whom he stared for ten minutes, twenty, half an hour, dreading movement that would confirm his father had gained access to the house.