Half the Day Is Night (6 page)

“They are allowed?” he said when he had gotten through. “In France, they are not allowed in a public place.”

A good idea, she thought. She didn't like them and every so often she read where a tracking laser had burned someone's eyes. The walls were covered with advertisements. There were butterflies in a lot of them: women in carnival costumes with yellow gauze wings, women's faces painted with wings so their eyes became eyespots, the electric blue butterflies, this time alighting on a flash unit, wings scintillating as they settled and then flickered off, the advertisement tirelessly repeating. Why so many butterflies, were they this year's gimmick?

David sat down next to her, slouched on the bench studying his shoes. He looked very foreign in the suit. Of course he looked pretty foreign anyway. He really needed some new clothes. She should say something but she didn't want to insult him.

The people in the waiting room were the flotsam of midday. There were women who worked the evening shift, old women with their shopping bags, old men in old sweaters and tights that bagged under their knees and around their ankles. A group of boys who should have been in school stood by the door talking and laughing. They wore divers' vests that bared their long ropey arms. A crew. One had a leather demon mask hanging from a seal by a leather thong. The mask was supposed to mean something, it was some kind of rank. At least according to the vid.

David was watching the boys, too. “Why aren't they cold?”

“Pyroxin, probably.”

He looked at her sideways, he didn't understand.

“It's a drug. Makes your metabolism burn higher. Divers take it.”

He sort of sat up. “You don't get cold?” Interested. Surface people were always cold.

She shook her head, grinning. “It's illegal. Don't even think about it.”

He gave an exaggerated sigh and she laughed. She liked him. He could be funny when he wanted to. Once his English got a little better he'd do fine.

The metal door was the size of the door on her garage. As it pulled up, the boys ducked under, but everybody else waited until it was all the way up. The embarcadero was lined with advertisements and she could smell seawater from the surfacing pool.

They walked through the door and there was a sharp crack and David shouted, a hoarse startled shout.

“What—” Something red, bright arterial red, spattered the floor and her side. She shrieked. David crouched, one arm across his eyes and his whole front and left side was covered in red. She thought,
Diós mio,
he's hurt. He's been hurt, there was so much red, so much blood, all over him.

This is bad, she thought.

There was an acrid, eye-watering smell.

Astoundingly he was crouching there, not fallen, but there was so much blood she didn't want him to turn around. There had to be something bad if there was that much hurt and she didn't want to see it, and she stepped back a bit more and her back was against the wall.

She started coughing, David was coughing, still holding one arm over his eyes. Her eyes were watering furiously, tears blinding her.

Pinche
tear gas. It was the telltale. He had his right arm held straight out away and behind him. The telltale had gone off. It wasn't a bomb.

People in maroon were running towards them shouting at them in English and Creole. She saw a gun drawn. Mother of God don't let them shoot, she thought, it wasn't her fault. “It's a mistake!” she wheezed. Her throat hurt and she kept coughing. David was shouting in French, still holding his right arm over his eyes, and three Marine Security officers had their guns drawn on him. But he was all right, she thought, as long as they didn't shoot him he was all right.

“It's a mistake,” she said and coughed again.

“Shut the fuck up!” an officer yelled, wheeling on her with gun drawn. Just like the vid, she thought, and shut up.

*   *   *

David's wrist was burned where the telltale had gone off, and his eyes were bloody red from the gas. His suit was completely ruined. The Uncles gave him a pair of maroon overalls to wear and gave him his suit in a sealed plastic bag. He came out to the waiting room with his hair slicked down from the shower and his eyes on the floor.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He looked up at her with his red eyes, furious, but didn't say anything.

“I'm sorry,” she said, thinking, it wasn't really her fault. What could she have done? The Uncles had just lectured her for an hour on how they should have waited for the officer to come to the checkpoint. Her dress was ruined. She'd buy him a new goddamn suit.

“They said we can go now,” she said, her voice small.

He nodded. His left hand was still faintly red from the dye.

Maybe she should have said they should wait, but the woman at the checkpoint hadn't said anything about sensors at the shuttle ports, just banks. He could have insisted they wait.

Outside the station they stepped on the ped mover. He didn't say anything the entire trip to the port. He glanced up at her once, with his red furious eyes. They looked ghastly. Her eyes ached, too. But his eyes hurt to look at.

At the sub port he had to open the plastic bag and find the tickets in the wreckage of his suit. Her eyes started watering. The tickets were red and stank. “I'll take them,” she said.

He waited while she explained to the ticket clerk what had happened, and the clerk ended up punching her another set and throwing out the ones she had.

She came back and sat down beside David. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He nodded. Then he sighed. “It was a mistake,” he said.

She asked him what he meant, but he just shook his head and wouldn't explain any further.

3

Probation

On Saturday David drove Mayla to see her grandfather.

“I am thinking,” he said in the car, “I am not the person to do this job for you.”

“I think you're doing fine,” she said. “I expected it all to take some time to settle in.”

He thought of the telltale going off. The burn, the shock. For a moment he had felt the dye and thought it was the moment before one knows one is injured, when there is only the shock and the feeling of something wet. “No,” he said. “I think it is not a good idea.”

She did not say anything and he stole a glance at her. She was looking out at the road. “I'm sorry about the business in Marincite,” she said. “That was my fault.”

Yes, he thought, it was. “That is not it,” he said anyway, “I think I am just not the right person.”

“Is it Tim?” she asked. “He'll be leaving.”

He shook his head.

“You haven't even been here thirty days,” she said. He put the car on automatic and they accelerated smoothly onto the beltway. “Try it another sixty days,” she said. “It'll get better.”

“I do not think so,” he said.

“I can understand your feelings,” she said. “Tim is being a prick. And what happened in Marincite, that would shake up anybody.”

He shrugged. It would not get better, but sixty days wouldn't really make a difference. “All right,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said.

She directed him off the beltway and they dropped down to the second level of the city, then onto residential streets.

The street was a great deal like the street Mayla lived on. Just featureless garage doors, no sense of the residences behind the concrete. She had him stop, and she got out and palmed the sensor next to the garage door. For a moment he thought it wasn't going to open, and then the door lifted.

He expected a garage like Mayla's with space for a couple of cars but this space would have easily held twenty. A public garage, like at the bank. He had not thought much about where her grandfather would live in the city. He guessed he had imagined a place like Mayla's, not this huge residence for many people.

There were only two cars: a long car like Mayla's boss rode to work and a sedan. “Park next to the Benare,” she said and pointed to the sedan. Her voice echoed off the concrete. Why were there only two cars in the parking? It wasn't a workday.

At the back of the garage were wrought-iron doors on a lift. The iron was worked into figures, tall birds like cranes and palm trees and flowers. Like an ornate bird cage.

They went below the floor of the garage into a lobby. Concrete walls painted white, black and white tiles on the floor. Dusty Greek busts on pedestals like garden statuary. The space felt cold and disused, even colder than the usual lobby. This whole country seemed built of concrete.

She folded the lift door back and the iron crashed. He followed her across the black and white tiles into a carpeted hallway. The doors were big heavy wood, and set into each one like a porthole was a Chinese blue and white plate, blue willow plates depicting a girl and her lover fleeing her father the angry mandarin. Some of the doors were open. An office that looked unused—so this was not just residential flats. Then a storeroom full of old furniture. Then a bedroom. Just one room, with a bed. Like a hotel room almost except there was bric-a-brac all over the table: glass harlequins on a lace doily, feather masks on the wall and a handful of medicine bottles on a glass dish. An old woman's room.

Bedsitters? Rich daughter letting old grandfather live in poverty—although the place didn't feel impoverished, just empty and ugly and full of old people's used things.

He followed her down five steps and across a large room with dining tables and chairs draped in white cloths. The walls were mirrored, reflecting back white-shrouded furniture. Community dining?

“Jude?” she called.

The place made him uncomfortable, with its empty concrete rooms. Maybe it was being closed down or something? She had not said anything about having to move her grandfather, but then she hadn't said anything at all about him.

“Jude?” she said again, and he followed her through a door into a kitchen. Just a kitchen, good sized, with a wooden table and chairs and a shiny yellow tile floor. The black man mopping the floor said, “Don't you step on my floor, miss.”

“Jude,” Mayla said.

The man leaned the mop up against the counter and tiptoed across the clean floor and gave Mayla a hug. “Where you been?” he asked.

“I've been busy,” Mayla said.

“He's an old man.” “Old mon,” Jude actually said, in helium falsetto.

“I know, I know. How's his cold?”

Jude shrugged. “The man, he's eighty-two.”

“Is he in bed?”

“No, he's out on the spring court.”

“Is Domingo with him?” she asked.

The man shook his head. “There's nothing wrong with Domingo. You just feeling guilty, knowing Domingo is taking care of him and you don't get out here often enough.”

“I didn't say anything,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. They both laughed, as if this was an old thing between them.

“You both staying for dinner?”

“Oh, Jude, this is David Dai, he's working for me. David, this is Jude.”

“Where's that other one?” The man's voice was carefully neutral.

“Tim is going back to Australia. We can't stay for dinner this time. Next time, I promise.”

David suddenly understood, this was all one house. This was all Mayla's grandfather's house. The lobby, the parking, all the rooms. The dining room draped in white. All empty.

“I'm baking potatoes,” Jude said, “not in the flash, neither.”

“With real sour cream?” Mayla asked.

“What do you think?”

“Next time,” she said. “I promise.”

All one house. Huge and ugly and cold.

He followed her again, back out across the empty dining room and up another five steps to a room with mirrors like windows and tables covered with lace and picture frames. Another wooden door with a blue and white plate set in it. Mayla pushed the door open and yellow light spilled out.

The room was full of light and he blinked. The bright air was damp and misty, no, it was misting. Raining. Like rain. Space went up and up; twice, three times the height of the kitchen. There were clusters of plants and in the center of each clump stalks of tall bamboo, four or five meters high. The floor was terra-cotta tile, glazed Indian red with artificial rain. All around the walls, tall mirrors like windows. And in the center was an old man in a wicker chair and a young man holding an old navy blue umbrella.

“Hello,” Mayla said, her voice too loud and too cheerful, “over your cold?”

“Nearly,” the old man said. He was a flat-faced, long-boned ugly old Chinese man with dyed black hair. At least David assumed it was dyed. “How is the bank?” the old man asked.

“The bank is doing well,” she said. “Can you turn off the sprinklers? We're getting wet.”

She took the umbrella from the young man—Domingo?—and held it while he went to turn off the sprinklers. “I just got back from Marincite,” she said. “Did you read in the paper about Tumipamba's funeral?”

“Jude said your picture was in the paper,” her grandfather said.

There had been an im in the paper, of the coffin with Mayla standing at the foot, facing out of the picture. Mayla's presence in the picture was an accident. Crisp black-and-white im, the cliché of funerals. Tim had said she looked like “a frigging presidential widow.”

“I went to the funeral.” She sounded defensive.

“That was stupid,” he said.

“I was working with Tumipamba,” she said. “I thought I should go to the funeral.”

“And get your picture in the paper?”

“I didn't even know they took the im,” she said.

“You were working with this man? In Marincite?”

“We're negotiating an agreement,” she said. “With Marincite.”

She offered that as a kind of gift, her voice hopeful. The old man was silent, considering.