“For what,” he said.
“Before the shakes,” she said. “You need to get warm.”
“I don’t feel cold,” he said, although his skin was white with chill. But he didn’t feel cold.
“You will,” she said.
She made him pull off his long underwear. He was more embarrassed by the scars on his knee than he was by his nakedness. His nakedness just didn’t seem to matter in front of Patel.
He was cold. But he couldn’t stand up, didn’t feel as if he had the strength, and his legs were shaking from the cold. He just wanted to sleep.
“Get in,” she said.
His teeth were chattering. He was cold, so cold, and so tired. “Want to lay down,” he said.
“Get in and sit on the floor,” she said, grabbing him by his upper arm and hauling him to his feet. She was strong, and there he was, swaying for a moment, and then she propelled him into the shower. The sound of the water ricocheted off the white tiles. When she let go he sat down, skin against the bare tile.
The water was hot, too hot, but he didn’t have the energy to get up and turn it down, so he sat, letting it beat against the top of his skull. Rain on the boneroof.
After a few minutes the water began to cool, and he had to palm the wall to get to his feet. He was surprised to find that the water was only set for lukewarm, and he turned it up hotter and sat back down.
He dozed, dreaming of a flat he had lived in, only the room was dark—and jerked awake when he heard voices. Fish jocks. He managed to stand up and turn the water off. He was red and wrinkled. The air was cold and he shivered.
“Kim? Hey Kim!” Santos was still in dripping gear. “Hey man, you okay?”
“Would you get my clothes?” David asked.
“Sure man. Patel tell you to take a shower?”
David nodded.
Santos disappeared, came back with a towel and clothes. “Go on and sit down. You okay, man? Park! I said, you okay?”
“Yeah,” David said.
“Okay.”
Getting clothes on was tedious, but he managed, and then while Santos was still showering, he made his way back to the bunks and crawled in. He was cold, and he—
“Parks. Come on, man, wake up. You gotta get up.”
“What?” He sat up and tried to run his fingers through his hair but it was ratted from lying down on it wet. He was glad he’d had it cut.
“Come on,” Santos said. “You gotta wake up. You gotta eat.”
He wasn’t hungry. He’d skip dinner.
“No man, you gotta eat. You don’t eat you’ll feel worse tomorrow.”
Santos badgered him, getting him out of the bunk. God it was cold out from under the blankets.
Santos herded him down to the dining hall, chattering a mile a minute about how after a pyroxin reaction you had to eat. “Carbos,” he said to the cooks, “give him some spaghetti, and refrieds, and a roll, yeah.” Spaghetti and refried beans. But it smelled good. Santos got him a bowl of stew and a piece of cake, too.
“Yeah, I been downside three, four times,” Santos said. “Once time I had a seizure, you know? I mean, I don’t remember it or nothing. If I throwed up in the mask, like I coulda died, you know? This guy used to be a diver here, Carlos something, Carlos, Carlos, I forget his last name, anyway, he did that, choked on his own vomit, died before they could even get him to the yard. Eat some of the stew, too. Stew sucks today, I hate the fish stew here, my mama makes great fish stew.”
Santos ate and talked and badgered him until he had eaten a lot of what was on his tray. David couldn’t believe how much he ate.
And then he could barely keep his head up. He was afraid Santos wouldn’t let him sleep, but Santos told him that sleeping was the best thing he could do. “You’ll be okay tomorrow. You take two? You and me, man, we don’t be big enough to take two. Big Andre, he got all that fat, he can take two. Facon’s pissed, but Facon is always pissed. She’ll dock you two shifts’ pay, but it’s your first time. People ask you if you take pyroxin, like Facon, you say no. She know you be lying, but if you say yes, then everybody gets in trouble, okay?”
David let the talk wash over him as he climbed back into the bunk. He remembered lying there for awhile, hearing something on the vid. And then he slept.
The alarms started going off at the usual time the next morning. He sat up. Everything ached and he still felt tired. But he stumbled out of bed.
Coffee helped and by the time they had to suit up for first shift, he didn’t feel too much worse than a hangover. He looked at his pyroxin, wondered if he should take one.
He had to take one. Everybody took them. How the hell could anyone dive without them? So he tossed it back, like always.
Another day in the dark.
12
Gone to Earth
Each morning there was Sophie from the security agency who drove Mayla to work. Sophie was a young, narrow-faced girl from the fourth level. When Sophie opened her mouth it was possible to hear her whole history—a girl from the second or third level, whose good Catholic parents had sent her to school where she got an education that prepared her to work for a security agency. Mayla suspected that Sophie had earned the honorable C.
Sophie talked about her boyfriend as she drove. Her boyfriend was Haitian and his name was Albert, and he was looking for a job. Apparently Albert had been looking for a job for as long as he had been living with Sophie, and Mayla suspected he would continue to look for as long as Sophie would put up with him. Mayla listened and tried not to think about the fact that Sophie seemed even less competent than Tim.
She was not treated badly at First Hawaiian, despite the Marincite buy-out. People said “Good morning Mayla.” Sevrin Parker even said good morning to her. Sevrin Parker never said good morning unless you said something to him first. Sevrin was a bastard who everybody suspected had something on the CEO because everybody hated him. He was good with figures but horrible with people. Having Sevrin be polite to her made her feel as if she had some sort of terminal disease.
Which was probably true, least as far as her career went. Marincite Corp. owned the bank. They would leave the name, First Hawaiian, and they were reviewing to decide if there would be any changes but for now they said there would be no firings.
Her desk was clean when she came in the morning, and it was clean when she left. Before the sale, the Marincite deal had become most of her work. Now she should have been establishing new accounts, but Alex Morel, her boss, had suggested that she not worry about that until they knew what was going to happen. So she went to work about nine, looked through her existing accounts, maybe wrote a renewal note, and at about three in the afternoon Sophie picked her up and took her home.
After three weeks, she walked into Alex Morel’s office and handed in her resignation.
“I’m sorry,” he said. But he didn’t say, “Please stay.”
She signed a non-compete clause that said she could not work for another financial institution in either Caribe, New York or the Pacific Rim for two years. She received a reasonable cash settlement as a partner.
And she was free. Sophie came to pick her up. Sophie thought her job was first rate. “Usually, the people I work for, they have to work all these hours, unless they’re with the government. Do you work at home a lot?”
“No,” Mayla said. “I just quit.”
Sophie didn’t know what to say about that.
“I guess I don’t need security,” Mayla said. Then she added, because it was the one day in her life when she knew she could, “Albert is a parasite, you ought to get rid of him.”
Sophie didn’t look at her. Mayla thought that she’d gone to far; anglo ladies didn’t really have much right to be commenting on Sophie’s life. Then Sophie grinned. “Yeah, I’m knowing, but sometimes you just do.” And she chattered all the way home about what a no-good Albert was, but how’d she met him when he was a life model for her drawing class. Sophie really liked art. Which proved that t
here were parts of people you never guessed. “You take care of yourself, Ms. Ling,” Sophie said, when she let Mayla off. “You’re good people.”
It was a day for speaking her mind. Which was good, because she had to tell her grandfather that she no longer had a job. She had to tell her grandfather what had happened to his bank.
“Grandfather,” she said. “First Hawaiian has been taken over by Marincite Corp.”
He blinked at her, an old Chinese man with a skinny wattled neck and very thick glasses.
“They haven’t dismantled the bank,” she said. “Everything is the same as before, Ives Istel is still head of the board, he just reports to Polito Navarro.”
Her grandfather didn’t say anything, which frightened her. Domingo waited, holding tightly on to the back of a chair. Tim stood in the doorway with Jude. They had all agreed he had to be told.
“Polito Navarro,” she explained, “is CFO of Marincite Corp.”
He cleared his throat. “You work for Marincite Corp?”
“The bank belongs to Marincite Corp., but I resigned,” she said. She didn’t know what she was going to say when he demanded to know what she was going to do. She didn’t know what she was going to do. She didn’t know how she was going to explain what she had done, how she had caused his bank to be swallowed up.
“You resigned?” he said.
She nodded.
“Good,” he said.
He didn’t ask any questions at all.
* * *
Mayla stayed in her room a great deal. It was bare but still full of the fine dust that comes from concrete. The house felt as if it would never be clean. She was in her room when Jude said that the police were calling. The moment Jude said “the police” she knew it was about David Dai.
The woman calling was a uniformed officer: a blue and white with a pinched square face that made Mayla think she had grown up poor. “Ms. Ling,” she said, “we’d like you to come down and make an identification.”
“Identify who?” she said without meaning to.
“Ms. Ling,” she said, “if you do not come down voluntarily I will have to send an officer to pick you up.”
“I’ll be there,” she said. She knew from the vids what it meant to identify someone, someone was dead. She would be looking at a body, not cleaned and made to appear asleep. She had never seen a body except for her grandmother and her grandmother had died in a hospital, her death only a continuation of her decline.
Domingo drove her down. There was no reason to assume it was David, but she couldn’t think of anyone else it might be.
Maybe he was just arrested, was still alive. She’d have to have a lawyer then. Her lawyer wasn’t a criminal lawyer. She tried to think of who she might call if David was in custody, who did she know who had any pull? Maybe her grandfather could call Enrique Chavez, but she didn’t know if that would do any good. If they had David in custody a few days they would need a doctor. (Horror stories, electrical shocks, burned testicles, sometimes the old methods are best.)
If he was dead, maybe he had been killed “resisting custody.” Or maybe he had committed suicide. A lot of people committed suicide when they were interrogated. She wondered how many of them really committed suicide, if given the opportunity to stop interrogation, wouldn’t some people kill themselves?
She didn’t know how she felt. Nothing was real. When she saw the body, would that make it real? What would the body look like? Would she get sick? Would it change her to see a body? Would her life turn at this moment?
Rehearsing, she was always rehearsing. It would be nice to have a genuine, unselfconcious moment that didn’t involve being shot at.
Domingo walked in to the station with her, which she appreciated. The sergeant told him to take a seat but he said, “I’m staying with Ms. Ling, her grandfather told me to.”
She was surprised, her grandfather had done no such thing.
The sergeant just shrugged and pointed to a set of double doors. “Room 154,” he said. Through the double doors was a wide hallway with a concrete floor. Domingo’s soft-soled shoes didn’t make any noise.
The hard-faced blue and white was waiting in Room 154, which turned out to be something like a reception office. “Ms. Ling,” she said, “sit down.” She looked Domingo up and down, raised an eyebrow and did not offer him a seat. “Bhagat,” she called into the next room, “get the viewer, would you? And get Ms. Ling a cup of coffee.” Then the hard-faced blue and white went back to something on her desk.
Domingo was pale. She was grateful he was here; she hadn’t always been nice to him and she didn’t deserve his loyalty. People went into police stations and never came out again.
Officer Bhagat brought a viewer and put it on the desk. Then he brought her a cup of coffee.
The blue and white nodded at the console ignoring the viewer. She was scanning something. “Okay, let me see the next one. No. No. No. Okay.” Mayla looked at the viewer and wondered what it would show. David with a noose around his neck, his hair in his face. Or crushed by a skid. Or drowned and bloated.
The blue and white cut the call. She picked up the viewer, flicked it on and looked in it for a moment. The she flicked it off and handed it to Mayla. The plastic case was cold and the lens was a blind reflective eye. Mayla flicked it on.
It was a body. It was a black woman.
It wasn’t David Dai.
“Who is it?” the blue and white asked.
She hadn’t been looking at who it was, she was looking at who it wasn’t. She didn’t know who it was. She didn’t know the woman. And then it came to her who it must be. “Anna Eminike,” Mayla said.
The im had been taken in a morgue. Anna Eminike was nude to the waist, from there down she was covered by a sheet. Her skin was the color of clay, a strange inhuman color, but she didn’t look badly used. Did bruises show up on the dead? Surely they did? Her mouth was flat, too wide, a grimace, and her chin was tucked down. Her left breast was small and whole, spread flat. Her nipple was shriveled and pointed, as if she was cold or aroused. Part of her right breast was gone and the muscle exposed was curiously pale. It was both too large and too innocuous to be a gunshot wound. There was something bluish white on her chest and Mayla peered at it for a moment and then zoomed in on it before she realized it was the exposed bone of a rib.
“Your employee, David Dai, identified her in a deposition,” the blue and white said. “She approached him in the parking on Merister St.” She meant at the bank. Mayla nodded. “Do you know where David Dai is?” the blue and white asked.
“No,” Mayla said. It sounded so rhetorical she expected the blue and white to answer: “he’s in jail,” or “he fled the country.”
Instead the blue and white said flatly, disappointed, “He hasn’t been in touch with you?”
Mayla shook her head.
“Please let us know if he does contact you.”
“What happened to her?” Mayla asked, lifting the viewer. Too late she thought maybe she wasn’t supposed to ask.
But the officer just said blandly, “She was resisting arrest. They prefer death to arrest. It is definitely Anna Eminike, the woman your employee saw.” She tapped the console and a piece of paper printed smoothly out. “Sign this please.”
“What is it?”
“A form,” she slid it across the table. “Sign at the bottom.” The paper had Mayla’s name and her grandfather’s address neatly printed at the top, followed by a couple of file numbers. There were a couple of long dense paragraphs of single-spaced text and then a signature line at the bottom.
“I’d like to call my lawyer,” Mayla said.
“It’s not necessary, sign the bottom please.” She tapped the signature line.
“I haven’t read it yet,” Mayla snapped.
The text was a description of the shooting in the parking naming Anna Eminike as the person who had shot at her and David. “I can’t sign this,” Mayla said, “I couldn’t see who was in the car.”
“I couldn’t see anything,” Mayla said. “I was behind a pillar. It’s in my statement. I’d be perjuring myself.” To her own ears she sounded oddly prim, as if this were some sort of breach of etiquette.
“Fine,” the blue and white said nastily and took the paper back. “I’m afraid there may be a few more things we’ll need to ask you. You’ll have to stay here.” She turned off the monitor and walked out, the door clicking behind her.
Mayla looked at Domingo. He tried to smile and shrugged.
She should have signed. Why did they want her to sign? What difference did it make? Anna Eminike was dead. If she signed they would have her perjuring herself, was that why they wanted her to sign? Or did they care if there were inconsistencies?
Mayla checked her chron, it was 7:57 p.m. Were they being monitored? Were they hoping she would discuss it with Domingo? If so they were going to be disappointed, she didn’t know what she would say to Domingo. She thought about picking up the viewer and looking at the im of Anna Eminike again, but she decided it would be better not to touch anything. Better to do nothing, to wait. The blue and white would have to come back eventually.
At 8:15 the blue and white had still not come back. She thought about getting up and trying the door. But if they were being monitored, what would that look like? On the other hand, if the door were unlocked, wouldn’t it be ironic if they could have just gotten up and left?
They couldn’t leave, even if the door was unlocked. If they left, they might as well simply leave Caribe, because no one ever ran out on the blue and whites.
How long should she wait before she did anything? She wondered if the monitor had security on it, if it didn’t require a password then she could use it to call her lawyer. Surely it had security on it. Systems at the goddamn bank had security on them.
Half the Day Is Night Page 25
