She takes her central position at the rail of the balcony that leads to the building’s main entrance. Two lieutenants take their places to the right and left of her. They unhitch a banner that drapes over the rail and reveals the night’s motto—Intercourse Is Genocide—written in red paint. Paige lets the quiet permeate the midst of this swollen mob, lets its meaning become palpable and fix the depth of her command. She turns her head from side to side, then lifts her candle into the air, to the full extension of her left arm.
Through the bullhorn, she yells, “The purge has begun,” and the crowd goes insane for the next few minutes, making it impossible for Paige to continue speaking.
The one-handed mother and Sylvia move up onto a knoll of grass that slopes down from the First Apostle Bank building, Sylvia watches the baby, almost a toddler and of indeterminate sex, shift its head on the mother’s chest. It’s a pudgy, sallow-faced child and even in this dim light smudges of crusted food can be seen on its cheeks, maybe some form of carrots or squash.
“Tonight,” Paige announces from the balcony, redemanding that attention of the crowd, “is the Night of Short Candles. And it will be remembered for years to come as the first strike in the battle that will free us forever. In a few hours, sisters, we are going to cut down their balls.”
Sylvia looks up at Paige Beatty, then around at the crowd. She listens to the escalation of the leader’s rage and feels the way it’s palpably spreading among the faithful. She turns to the mother and says, “That’s pretty extreme stuff.”
The new friend is ready for the comment.
“Paige says people are sheep. You’ve got to hit them over the head. You’ve got to be extreme. You’ve got to be visceral. Go for the throat. You have to make them see behind the screens. Make them understand all the signs and signals being pumped out as part of the war against us. All this common junk, you know, from Playboy to the beer ads, it’s even more insidious by its subtlety.”
“Beer ads are porn?” Sylvia asks.
The mother gives a look like she’s not sure why Sylvia’s here, like Sylvia might be something worse than the sheep. Something like the wolf’s collaborator. And Sylvia wants to tell her, this stranger with a metal claw at the end of her arm and a shivering child sleeping at her neck, that she’s nobody’s collaborator. That she’s a free agent. That she’s so free she’s dizzy with the isolation.
A new wave of explosive cheering sounds and it becomes clear that if Paige wants to get through the speech she’s going to have to tone down the inflammatory rhetoric.
“No one can fight for us,” Paige’s voice booms, hoarse with the intensity of both her rage and her empathy. “We unite. And we fight. Or we die. Because make no mistake, don’t let yourselves be deceived ever again, they are our enemy,” spitting out these four words loudly and slowly.
Sylvia leans into the ear of the mother and asks, “What’s the baby’s name?”
The woman turns and gives a surprised and maybe angry look, then says, “Maria.”
“They answer,” Paige screams, “we are your fathers, your sons, your brothers, and husbands. But no fact of relation can change the nature of the beast. And on that day the species enters puberty, the switch is thrown that regresses the boy back to the swamp at the dawn of time when the code of aggression was imprinted on his animal heart.”
“How old?” Sylvia asks Maria’s mother.
This time she says, “I’m trying to listen to this.”
“See the beast for what he is,” from the bullhorn. “He is our oppressor. He is the savage who would enslave our bodies, destroy our minds, and obliterate our spirits. He of the Y chromosome. He of the testosterone depravity.”
Sylvia stares at the child. She tries to picture, if Perry and she had a child, what would it look like. She can’t do it. She can’t produce the image.
All she can hear are the amplified words that seem to assault the air around her head.
“The exploitive, objectifying demon. The primal brain that escaped evolution and now strives always to dominate, to victimize, to abuse into submission, to erase our very presence. This is his Final Solution. This is his death camp. The images he makes us into are his ovens. And we will not, we can not, walk into those ovens peacefully. I am calling for an absolute separatism. And I am calling for a holy war. We must rage. We must fight. We must battle with everything we have inside us. There can be no truce. There can be no compromise. We must rise and we must triumph.”
The crowd hits its climax and comes together in an evangelical hysteria. And then Sylvia’s being hugged by her hook-sister. After a minute they step back, out of the embrace, and Sylvia sees the water off her slicker has partly obscured the name on the chalkboard. It must have been something like Benny or Barry. Sylvia reaches out and touches the chalkboard and says, “Did he do that? To your hand?”
The woman nods and shrugs at the same time and says, “Sort of. It’s a long story.”
Sylvia gestures to the Intercourse Is Genocide banner and asks, “Do you believe that?”
The woman gives an earnest nod.
“You don’t think sex can ever be okay?”
The woman stares at her for a second, smiles and says, “Not with a man.”
Sylvia nods because she doesn’t know what else to say and they both turn their attention back to the balcony as Paige Beatty relights the head of her candle with a pocket butane, brings up the bullhorn one more time and says, “Now let’s burn down their filthy constitution and let the flames ignite our war.”
31
The train lot behind Gompers Station looks like a ridiculously gritty set from something filmed in a ruined city near the end of a particularly vicious war. Gompers itself seems unreal, this crumbling, graffiti-obscured hulk of broken white marble, toppled Ionic columns, charred rosewood, and thousands of splinters of stained glass that once, combined, depicted an idealized tour of the industrial age. It’s almost as if the ruined building was really just a one-dimensional fronting propped up by plywood struts, or maybe worse, an intricately detailed matte painting that could be broken through by a speeding car or a rain of bullets.
The only lighting comes from the moon and the red bugeye spots near the junction of two freight lines. The ground is a brittle carpet of cinder and ash and gravel. And the temperature has dropped, triggering Jakob’s asthma and causing wisps of steam to gust from his mouth with each struggling exhale.
He tries to ignore his lungs, huddles inside the boxcar and looks down on his notebook.
EXT. LOWENSTEIN ROAD — NIGHT
The Doomed Man emerges from an alley in a stumbling lope. Stops to steady himself in front of LASZLO’S CAFE. Falls to one knee. Places hand against storefront window. Looks in window at display shelf to see freshbaked rolls. Looks from rolls to his own vague reflection.
EXT. LASZLO’S CAFÉ
Focus change to show a customer within the café notice the Doomed Man framed in window. Attention of all patrons turns to the window. Slow zoom through window to WAITRESS who lifts head from order pad. widens eyes, lifts arm, points finger and mouths words, “It’s him,” though we can’t hear her.