Page 47 of The Midnight Hour
Nicole throws back her head as she lets out a laugh of genuine humor, hard a sound as it is. “No. Because he said he’d make William believe we’d been having an affair.” I stare at her, and then she spells it out in a voice that suggests I’m stupid, which I probably am: “And if William believed that, which he would, he would kill me.” Still I stare, and Nicolesighs impatiently. “All right, that might be a little melodramatic. William has never laid a hand on me, although I wouldn’t put it past him. I’ve seen it in his eyes, when he’s wanted to, but he’s too controlled for that. He prefers emotionalviolence.”
Which sounds terribly chilling. “Why haven’t you ever divorced him?”
“Because,” she informs me flatly, “he has a watertight prenup and he’d do his utmost to make my life a misery if I let him—and then there’s Ben.” Her expression softens on her son’s name even as her eyes flash with something close to hatred for her husband. “Ben adores him, but William would poison him against me, and Ben wouldn’t even realize he was doing it. He’d drip it into his ear and my son would turn against me without even knowing why. I couldn’t stand that. I just couldn’t.” She draws a ragged breath as she wipes at her cheeks.
“I understand,” I say quietly. I feel as if Sam has turned against me, quietly but determinedly, but that, of course, is my own doing. Nicole’s situation is far more sympathetic…and so very grim. “So you convinced William to leave the bunker?” I surmise. I have trouble believing that such an arrogant man would be willing to go meekly, without a good reason.
“I can be surprisingly persuasive when I play the scared little woman.” For a second she smiles, her eyes glinting with humor, and I have that strange sense of complicity that we have shared before and which makes me feel Nicole and I really could be friends. Maybe, I reflect, we already are. “I told him we’d be better off somewhere else, where I didn’t have to be scared, and where people would value his intelligence and leadership abilities. Men can be so stupid when it comes to their egos.” She sighs. “At least mine can. Your husband seems okay.” She glances at me in query, and I find myself blushing—in shame.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I was angry with Daniel,unbelievably angry, and yet it all seems so petty now, especially in light of all that Nicole has endured.
“He’s a good man,” I state, a fact.
Nicole nods. “You’re fortunate, then.”
“I am,” I agree, and I know I mean it.
We are silent for a long moment; from the gym I can hear the smarmy bleating of the actor in the movie.
“The thing is,” Nicole remarks after a moment as she lights another cigarette, “that man—the one who raped me—he wasn’t actually a bad guy.”
I stare at her in disbelief. “He raped you, knowing you’d never tell your husband, and kicked you out of a bunker into a nuclear holocaust, and he’snota bad guy?” And what about there being no good guys?
“I mean before,” she clarifies. “He was some tech millionaire, smart and a little nerdy, but kind of charming, too. We knew him socially. He was always kind of self-deprecating, never arrogant, a little socially awkward, maybe.” She smokes silently for a few seconds. “But when we were all in that bunker,” she continues reflectively, “with the swimming pool and Nespresso machines and all the rest of it…well, you’d think everyone would stay civilized, but it’s a thin line, you know? And it’s so easy to cross. And it made me realize that most people aren’t evil—they’re not these Machiavellian monsters you can dismiss as horrible anomalies of the human race, twirling their moustaches as they plot to take over the world. Most people are just small-minded and selfish, pathetic and petty, and when everything else breaks down, well, that’s what comes out.”
She lowers her gaze from her study of the darkened horizon to gaze at me. “Michael Duart’s got this great vision, right? Or so he says. But what’s the point of a vision, anyvision? How can we possibly build a better world when it’s still full of broken, selfish,stupidpeople? And I don’t mean intellectually.Just…” She shakes her head slowly. “No one has the will for anything bigger, and so we’ll all hunker down in our bunkers and bases and eke out our days and nothing good will ever happen. Nothing bigger than this, than our stupid little selves, because no one is willing to risk what they have, no matter how small it is.” She finishes her cigarette and drops it onto the cracked asphalt before deliberately grinding the butt beneath her leather boot. “Welcome to the rest of your life,” she tosses over her shoulder as she walks away, into the darkness.
NINETEEN
A month after my heart-to-heart—or not—with Nicole Stratton, four men, no more than boys, really, are evicted from the NBSRC for drinking. They were friends of Sam’s, the guys he played basketball with, some of them only sixteen years old, and they found some booze in the warehouse. One evening after curfew they drank two bottles of vodka and went joyriding around the base in a jeep.
Daniel and I were in bed, holding on to each other for warmth, because now it’s nearing the end of August the nights are getting chilly, when we heard them roar past, honking the horn, out of their minds—an act of idiocy, daring, or desperation, or maybe all three. We heard someone speaking through a bullhorn and then a single shot, fired in warning. Neither of us spoke as we waited, clinging to each other now, having no idea what had happened.
The next morning Sam tells us all about it.
“They just chucked them out,” he says, caught between disbelief and outrage. Underneath both emotions I sense a deep, pervading unhappiness. “With nothing. I mean, no supplies, noweapons…just the clothes on their backs. It’s so unfair. All they did was have a drink.”
Daniel and I have been listening to his rant silently, offering neither sympathy nor judgement. It’s the first time since we’ve arrived that we’ve seen the zero-tolerance policy enacted, and it’s immensely sobering. The thought of four young men, none of them over twenty and two of them significantly younger, escorted out of the camp to face the wide world with only the clothes on their backs…well, it does make you straighten up, determined to toe the line and, more importantly, to be seen doing it.
I mention the whole episode to Nicole; we’ve chatted periodically over the last few weeks, and her cool-voiced cynicism is refreshing and dispiriting in turns.
“What did you expect?” she asks when I broach the subject. “You can’t have a zero-tolerance policy and then not enforce it. That’s just asking for alotof trouble.”
“I know, but…” I hesitate, trying to untangle my feelings. “It just seems so harsh. Couldn’t they have given them some supplies? A gun?”
“A gun?” She is incredulous, her elegant eyebrows—despite having been in this camp as long as I have, she looks salon-fresh—arched. “So these kids could use it against them?”
Them, not us, I note. I wonder if Nicole allies herself with anyone. “No, but…some food, then,” I persist. “Some supplies.”
She shrugs. “This isn’t a charity.”
“Yes, but it’s meant to be a community, isn’t it?” I reply, a little sharply, gesturing to the base stretching all around us. “We’re meant to be working together, building something here.”
Once again her eyebrows lift, and a little smile plays about her mouth. “Are we?” she asks.
The question—and the infuriating lack of an answer to it—continues to haunt me as the days and then weeks go by. August drifts into September as the leaves turn shades of crimson and ochre, their edges curling up before they flutter to the ground, turning brown beneath our feet.
I begin to realize that I’m not the only one asking questions, feeling uncertain and even discontented. The mood of the base has shifted with the seasons; as the first frost tips the grass and rimes every dead leaf in white, I feel it like an electric current in the air, rippling silently around everyone as we go about our business—sleep, eat, work, the weary slog of this half-life.
