Half the Day Is Night

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “What is your problem?” Tim asked.

  Moustache turned around and walked away a few steps. Turned around again and he had a gun. A little gun, the size of his hand, all graphite gray. Not like the handgun that Tim carried under the seat of the car. Small. Illegal-looking.

  Nobody said anything. Please God, Mayla thought, let it be all right. Just let this be over. In a couple of hours this will be over.

  Moustache was full of contained energy. He was looking at Tim and she knew not to move because if she moved he might look at her and she didn’t want Moustache to think about her. It was awful, hoping that he wouldn’t notice her, being glad that Tim was his target. It was sinful. But she did, she couldn’t help it. Don’t notice me, she thought. Don’t move, she thought to Tim.

  Tim did not move. Like the tawny-haired girl, he did not even seem to breathe.

  “Bueno,” Moustache said. Then he looked at her and she felt her breath stop, a pain in her chest. His eyes were brown, the whites yellowed; his eyes were diseased looking and he was watching her with his rancid eyes. She didn’t know what was going to happen.

  He aimed the gun at her and she could not imagine what she should do. Move, leap away like the vid. But the truth was she couldn’t think. If she moved he would shoot her. Maybe if she didn’t move, he would not shoot. But if he was going to shoot she should move. She could not think, could not make herself move. How would she know when he was going to shoot? How would she know when to jump? Please, God, don’t let him shoot. She was afraid of the pain. She was afraid to die. She couldn’t. She couldn’t. Please.

  Nobody did anything.

  She could not even look at the gun, just his rancid eyes. The way the irises looked as if they were not sharply round, as if the edges were breaking down, melted looking.

  It went on and on. How long had she stood here like this? A minute, five minutes? Ten minutes? She had to do something. She wanted to just be still, hope it went away. She had to do something. Breathe. The veins in his yellowed eyes. Maybe he had a medical condition? Jaundice? People didn’t get jaundice anymore, did they?

  She opened her mouth, but nothing happened.

  Be still. Don’t startle him, if she startled him he’d jerk, he’d squeeze, he’d fire.

  “Hey,” she said, so softly, because that was how her voice came.

  He didn’t jerk, didn’t move at all. Now he was going to kill her.

  “Oye, eschucha,” she said. “Hey, listen.”

  He didn’t answer her. She would make him angry. Just a little push and he would shoot.

  “Hey,” she said. “We’re here to make you a loan. We’re here to do a little business.”

  Moustache watched her with his yellow eyes.

  “Everybody is here to do business,” Saad echoed. His voice sounded smooth, soothing. His voice made her hopeful. His voice said everything would be all right. But maybe that wasn’t true. Some times when you thought everything was going to be all right, it wasn’t.

  “We want to talk,” she said.

  And Moustache turned and aimed the gun into the office. The gunshot was a little sound, just a blurt.

  The tawny-haired girl shrieked and Tim started. Moustache laughed. “No mindgames,” Moustache said. “You see? No mindgames.”

  Mayla was suddenly aware of the sweet chemical smell again, so strong she felt dizzy. “No mindgames,” she agreed. She would go through the motions, she would say anything he wanted, and then she would get away.

  Moustache looked around the loft. Looked at Saad and grinned. They were all standing around watching him, waiting for what he would do. Mayla could feel the individual tickles of perspiration on her ribs. Her jacket would be perspiration stained, maybe ruined.

  “Maybe,” Moustache said, “we should show the lady what we make?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Saad said, soft.

  “Fuck you,” Moustache said conversationally. That struck him as funny. “Fuck you,” he said again, liking the sound of it. “I think we should.”

  Humor him, diffuse the situation. “Okay,” Mayla said.

  Saad looked startled. Moustache rounded on her, delighted. “You see? La norteamericana wants to see.”

  “I don’t think—” Saad said.

  “That’s right,” Moustache said, “you don’t think. Go get some bracelets.”

  Saad went back into the office. Mayla found she didn’t want him out of sight, she felt better when he was right there. He could talk to Moustache. Tim was just watching, very still, his face blank. She didn’t know what he was thinking, or what he was planning. Don’t do anything, she thought, just don’t be crazy.

  She heard the jingle of keys, loud in the loft. Moustache was looking at her, and he still had the gun in his hand, although it wasn’t aimed at her. It wasn’t aimed at anyone, as if he had just forgotten it. She tried not to look at it, so she wouldn’t remind him he had it, but she didn’t know what to look at. Should she look at Moustache? She couldn’t look away, she needed to watch him, she had to know what he was doing. He could do anything.

  If she kept looking at him, would he get mad? She couldn’t look at his eyes, so she glanced away, but looked back at him, in his eyes. Away, across the loft, at Tim. Back at Moustache, back down at the gun, back up at his strange eyes. She didn’t know what to do with her gaze.

  Saad came back out of the office and she could look at him. Then she could watch Moustache again because he was watching Saad.

  “Let’s see,” Moustache said.

  Slave bracelets. They didn’t look like anything, just a plate of dull metal on a strap like a watchband. He had six or seven of them and he held them out to Moustache, who selected one and held it up, dangling it like the strap was a tail.

  “You try one before?” he asked.

  “No,” Mayla said.

  “Go ahead. I think you like it.”

  “That’s okay,” she said.

  “No, really,” Moustache said. “It’s good. You try.”

  “I,” she swallowed, “I can’t.”

  “Are you playing games?” he said, conversational, and she felt the prickle on her neck.

  “Let me look at it,” she temporized. She held out her hand to take it but Moustache took her hand and turned it over. Tim gave a little start.

  “Enough,” he said.

  “Shut up,” Mayla said, sharply. That startled him. Moustache laughed and the color started in Tim’s neck. Be embarrassed, she thought, just don’t be stupid.

  Moustache’s hand was damp. Like the air. She wanted to wipe her hand off. He held her hand a moment, as if he was going to tell her fortune, looking at her palm, at her long fingers. Maybe he was, maybe he was making her future. She thought, she would be changed by this, by the slave bracelet. Like losing her virginity.

  Moustache turned her hand back over and put the bracelet on so that the flat metal plate was against the pale inside of her wrist. Then he did the flat catch.

  She expected a jolt, like an electric current, but it wasn’t like that at all. No spike, no high. But her head felt clear. Her thoughts weren’t all skittering. She felt calmer. Still scared, but calmer.

  “See? Is not so bad.” Moustache smiled at her.

  And well. Not tired, when was the last time she had not felt tired? She realized that people felt tired all the time. The only time people didn’t feel tired was when they were really angry, or really happy, or really frightened, and then they couldn’t appreciate it. Now she could feel what it was like not to be tired. It was wonderful, as if something had been lifted off her. This was the way people were supposed to feel.

  “She likes it,” Moustache said.

  She did like it. Very much, she liked it.

  “Now we will discuss business?” Moustache said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Tim shook his head.

  “It’s not like that,” she said. “It doesn’t make your head muddled.” It made it easier to thi
nk, because her mind wasn’t dragged down by all those feelings and tiredness. She felt good.

  She could weigh the pros and cons. She dug out her papers and her chips. Her hands were shaking a little. She was still afraid; if she thought about it she could find it, her fear. It was a thing in her thoughts, like a rock in a river, and she could flow around it. Because of the bracelet. Good to be afraid, just not so afraid that she couldn’t act.

  Maybe she couldn’t trust her thoughts? Bracelets were illegal. She laid out her papers and Moustache started reading. But they were illegal because of the degeneration they caused in the nervous system. Because of prolonged use. And they were addicting because they really did enhance. So she should take advantage of this one time. Lucky, because this was the one time she really needed it.

  While Moustache read she looked around the loft. People were amazing. Tim was amazing. His skin was amazing, flushed with capillaries in his face and neck, so smooth over his forehead. Tim was so handsome. But so was Saad, with his high temples and his beautiful, neat hands. Dark and almost manicured looking. People were extraordinary, and nobody realized it except maybe for a few great artists and poets. How completely artificial it was to divide people into beautiful and ugly.

  Moustache handed each paper to Saad as soon as he had read it. Mayla looked at the tawny-haired girl. She was strained and tired looking, but beautiful, too. Youth was truly astounding. No wonder they all worshiped youth. Even through her tiredness she glowed, and Mayla felt the pang of loss. And she never knew it was hers to lose because she never realized she had it until she looked in the mirror one morning when she got out of the shower and saw the skin of her collarbones and neck and realized she was thirty years old and it was gone. It wasn’t fair.

  Moustache signed, Saad signed. She took the papers. “That’s it,” she said.

  “So when do we get the money?” Saad said.

  “It’ll take a couple of days to process, it has to go through the credit committee for approval,” she said. “I’m not in Julia, so maybe four days, and then it’ll be in your account.”

  “All record keeping comes through me,” Saad said.

  All record keeping was by numbered account, no names. “Your PO,” she said.

  “Perhaps you would like to buy a bracelet,” Moustache said. Pleased with himself.

  She could not. She fingered it, not wanting to take it off. That was why it was addicting, because it just made people more human, more themselves. Enhanced them.

  The tawny-haired girl smiled. “Hermana,” she said. “Sister.” A smile like Moustache’s, pleased with itself, and Mayla wondered if she had misunderstood. Was the girl Moustache’s daughter?

  Mayla unbuckled the clasp and the weight of twenty-one atmospheres fell on her like an ache. She shuddered. For a moment she didn’t want to move. The tiredness swallowed her up. Every day she felt this way, for the rest of her life, she felt this way. Oh, God, she couldn’t bear it.

  “If you want to buy,” Moustache said, “you let us know.”

  “Let’s go,” Tim said.

  And Saad, what did Saad think? Had he ever tried it? Could he see that she was hooked? She handed the bracelet to Moustache. She wanted it back. Moustache looked at her with his yellow eyes and she thought for a moment, now that he had what he wanted he would kill them.

  But the loan wasn’t through committee yet.

  Her mind started to go in different directions. She thought of the house, of hiring security, of the fact that now she was bound to Moustache by this loan.

  “Come on,” Tim said, urgent. Tim was scared.

  Oh, God, she was so tired and so scared and so unhappy. She gathered up her papers.

  “Be in touch,” Moustache said. “We can do business again.”

  He was crazy. She had bound herself to a married man, married to him by the bank and Polly Navarro. She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t think at all, could do nothing through her misery except follow Tim down the hollow steps, her heels clicking on the empty steps as if they were drums, all the sound bouncing.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Tim said on the street.

  “What?” she said.

  “Try the thing on? It could have done anything, you didn’t know if it was wired right or not! It could have fried your nervous system!”

  “It didn’t,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. He grabbed her wrist and started down the street.

  She wanted to run away. She wanted to go somewhere where she didn’t have to act, didn’t have to think. “After neural stimulation, there’s a bottoming,” she said.

  “What?”

  She was mumbling. Louder, she said, “After neural stimulation, people bottom out. I’ve read about it.”

  “Great,” Tim said.

  She didn’t want to see Saad Shamsi ever again. She most certainly didn’t want to see Moustache.

  She wouldn’t put the papers through. She’d burn them. It was illegal, a signed contract was a binding document and destruction of it without the other party’s consent was against the law. But what were they going to do, take her to court? She didn’t care about the Marincite loan, it wasn’t worth dying for. If she got the Marincite loan then she might eventually get promoted and then things would get even more complicated.

  She wanted to go somewhere and live, maybe Del Sud. Buy a flat, live by herself, watch the vid. Have a simple life. Quit the world. Anything was better than her life now.

  * * *

  She sat in a conference room, waiting to talk to Polly Navarro about the Marincite loan, about the takeover target to finance MaTE’s independence. She had a list of likely candidates. The air in this room was clean and dry. The window looked down on Manhattan. As far as she could tell, it was modern Manhattan. She had lived in Manhattan, she probably should have known whether it was a modern view or not.

  The hard light reflected off the wood conference table. She didn’t know if she should tell Polly that she wasn’t going to make Saad’s loan or not. She knew she’d have to find a way to let him know, but she didn’t know if she was supposed to pretend that Polly didn’t know what the company was or not. She knew she wasn’t supposed to tell him.

  Whatever happened, she had to think about being a banker.

  She was either going to have to deal with people like Moustache and Anna Eminike or emigrate. Or just wait for something to happen. And she couldn’t deal with Moustache or Anna Eminike, they were not people one dealt with.

  Emigrate.

  At one time in her life she had wanted to leave Caribe. More than anything. When she was fifteen she had finally gone to the surface for the first time when she went to Barcelona to see her mother.

  When she was fifteen, she thought she was maybe the only person at her school who had never been to the surface. It couldn’t have been true, but she remembered it seemed that way.

  As a girl she thought that she was really a surface person. She knew she would love weather. Wind; wind would be exciting, wind was like Wuthering Heights, she couldn’t exactly explain how but it was. And once she got there she would be with her mother.

  The sub was boring, Miami was strange. She had done five days of decompression in decomp at Port Authority and she was reacting to the change. It was night, but the lights in the terminal were too bright, the lights on poles outside even brighter. And the air smelled funny, organic: like food and garbage; potato and carrot scrapings. Plants. Grass. Nobody had ever told her that the surface smelled funny—even the ocean was loud and over the familiar briny smell it stank.

  She landed in Barcelona jangled and tired. Her mother was waiting with Gabriel, her four-year-old half-brother, and her mother’s second husband, Tito. Her mother’s hair was blonde instead of brown and she spoke lisping Spanish to the four-year-old and the husband. Mayla understood a little Spanish, but not very much.

  The sunlight was too bright, her head ached and her eyes watered. Barcelona was loud. They go
t on a tram and her half-brother stared at her with round black eyes, and her mother’s husband smiled too much. She couldn’t think of what to say. Every time she looked at her mother who was silhouetted against one of the blinding windows, she got afterimages when she turned away. The husband got off before they got home, he had to go to work. He worked in one of the blinding glass towers, unnervingly high. There was too much space, the sky was so blue, it seemed impossible that any stretch of space would be such an obvious, unnatural color.

  She was afraid she’d get a sunburn. Food tasted strange, salt wasn’t as salty and everything had a funny, metallic taste. It’s just adjustment, her mother said. At dinner, her mother kept speaking in Spanish to Tito and Gabriel. Tito tried to talk to her, but she didn’t understand him, even when he said things she knew the Spanish words for.

  “Mayla,” her mother said, “I wanted to bring you here for so long, but Jimmy’s mother—” her mother pursed her lips. Her mother wasn’t going to talk about Gram. Mayla didn’t talk about Gram either, but it made conversation oddly disjointed. Her mother kept saying, “Tell me about your life.” But after she had talked about school, Gram was in everything.

  Her mother took her shopping, bought her expensive things, with collars of eyelet lace, a sleeveless silk top, a quilted jacket. She tried to play with her half-brother, but he made her nervous. He liked to be tickled and he liked to wrestle, but pretty quickly he got rough, hitting her leg with his fist and laughing, and she didn’t know how to make him stop.

  The third day she was there they went downtown again and shopped. They were on the bus coming back from the city, and for the first time since she had arrived, she felt as if she could look out at the street without her eyes watering. “It’s cloudy,” her mother said. “You don’t need your sunglasses, Mayla.”

  But she liked them. “I can see better,” she said.

  There were trees and they pulled in the wind. It was like the vid, watching the trees. Mayla felt as if she wanted to be outside in the wind. She felt afraid, but it was a good kind of afraid—excited. Water started dripping down from the roof of the bus, condensation maybe, streaking her window. Streaking all the windows. Darkening the street. It wasn’t from the bus, she thought, it was rain.