Everyone was watching him, even Roland, who was sitting on the concrete floor between the bunks, playing solitaire. Roland was a new maroon. Santos fancied himself a ringleader, a streetcorner boy, and he recruited people to his société. Roland was a thick, sweet boy who was happy to be in anyone’s société and who couldn’t have been a wild maroon if his life depended on it.
“When you are fighting a war, it is not like the game,” David said. “When you are fighting a war, you learn that all the things people do, a lot of things that they believe in, are not real. They do not matter. When the police give you a citation for crossing the street in the wrong place, what does it matter? You have to go pay a fine, but you are still alive, you do not hurt. It is not real, that the corner is this place to cross, and that the middle is not a place. You are not hit by a car, nothing happens, the citation it is not about whether you are hungry, or you are hurt. People just do it because they don’t think about how if everybody stops obeying the rule it is gone.”
They didn’t understand.
“But you see,” he stumbled on, “things do not work if people don’t believe papers and laws and all those little stupid rules like what is fashion and how short your hair should be.” He swiped at his, it was getting long and he should get a trim. “War makes it hard to ever belong to anything again. You have to forget what you know. War makes you learn too much.”
Santos nodded, but he didn’t understand. “Is that how you hurt your knee? In South Africa?”
David nodded.
“What happened?”
“A man I was with, he stepped on a mine.”
“Did he die?” Roland asked.
“Of course he died,” Santos said, worldly wise.
Of course he did. So easy. Of course.
“Did you know him really well? Was he a friend of yours?” Roland asked.
“No, I was … how do you say, he reported to me. I was, like his sergeant.”
Santos looked thoughtful. “Did you feel like it was your fault?”
He shrugged. It was hard to remember now what he had felt. He had been so surprised. Had he thought about whether he should have done things differently? He supposed he had, in the hospital in In Salah, but he couldn’t remember that now. He remembered he had been waiting for so long, expecting a bullet or a shell or something, that he was mostly astonished at how unexpected it was, mostly astonished that he was surprised, because he would have thought it was almost a relief to get it over with and to know that he wasn’t dead.
He had been a little relieved. Once he knew he wasn’t going to die, at least. He had hoped he wasn’t going back although he hadn’t been sure until they told him in Algiers.
That was before he realized that the war had derailed him and that he couldn’t step back into his life. “Roland,” David said, “play the red seven on the black eight.”
Roland looked down.
Santos started talking about a new girl. “She’s Chinese, although I don’t think she looks so Chinese, she looks anglo. But she’s got some sort of Chinese name, and there wouldn’t be an anglo fish jock.”
“MacKenzie is anglo,” Roland said.
“She’s a foreman,” Santos said, dismissing Roland’s comment. “Kim, maybe you should meet her, might be a good thing, you and her.”
“Right,” David said.
He had thought—and he had not even realized it—that if he came to Caribe he could get away from the war. Even at home the war had been everywhere, all around him in the way his life after the war was so different than his life before. But the war was more here than it had ever been at home. Anna Eminike was here, and the violence, and Santos’ games of war. All around him was the dark. Surrounded by the night. The dark had never bothered him until after the war. So he had come to a place where it was night all the time. Stupid.
He sighed. Anywhere he went, half the day was night.
He spent so much time trying not to think about the war, what would happen if he gave up and just let the thoughts come?
But he couldn’t imagine letting himself think about it. Once he started thinking about it, he might end up one of those sad hulks who live the war every minute.
He shook his head. Think about things here. About a job, about the moment, that is what most people did. He could wonder about whether Naranji would have work for him in the lab. Twice now he had spent eight hours in the lab, helping Naranji with the new salmon project: running titrations on water samples to check for contaminants. There was a leak in the system and they were getting trace amounts of lubricant in the water. The salmon fry were sensitive.
He could, by dint of constant vigilance, keep himself distracted. But there were thoughts back there, like a toothache.
He bought two bottles of beer from Lopez, who kept a cooler under his bunk and charged twice what a bottle would cost in the store. But they weren’t supposed to have beer on the fish farm, so Lopez was charging for risk. Lopez also sold pyroxin. The beer helped him relax. Meph showed up and he opened a can of catfood. He thought he had controlled things quite nicely.
At ten he turned in, listening with one ear to the Spanish station on the vid at the other end of the bunkhouse with the words too far away for comprehension, not trying to understand, just listening to the rise and fall. Meph was curled up on the bed, and he put his hand on the cat. Meph purred and butted his head against David’s hand, hard bone under fur. Meph grabbed David’s hand in his teeth but did not bite hard, just watching, tail twitching. Ready to play. “No,” David whispered, pulling his hand away. He waited, sometimes Meph got it in his head to attack, but tonight Meph stared for a moment, then closed his eyes and sat, sphinx-like. The long bunkroom was almost empty, Sunday night a lot of the jocks got together for some sort of société, not like Santos’ group, but something else. Santos was part of it. He said it was like religion, but he wouldn’t say voudoun.
David didn’t care. In the stillness he drifted off, riding out on his thoughts, more and more distant from being really awake. The Spanish station became people talking in a group, but not paying any attention to him, which was fine with him—
Something came out from under the pillow beside him and for a moment he was frozen, he could see it there in the half light. Dull dark composite, flat like a plate, a manmade thing. Then it went off the bed and as he jerked up he caught a glimpse of it scuttling across the floor on hard crab legs and he heard the clitter of the feet made for sand and he almost cracked his head on the bunk above him.
A wandering mine. Like in South Africa. He couldn’t find it. It wasn’t real. A nightmare, he had done this before. He had felt it, but it wasn’t real. No one would have set a wandering mine loose in a bunkroom. It was a dream, he had had them before, dreams that were like hallucinations. Think, he told himself, what makes sense for reality. What would be true. Use your head, not your perceptions. If there were a wandering mine under his pillow when he lay down he would have activated it. Therefore, it couldn’t be here. And it made no sense for one to be here, anyway.
So it was a dream. Hypnogogic hallucinations, that is what they had called them in the hospital in Algiers. They didn’t mean he was crazy, lots of people had them, children had them. Night terrors. Dreams. They seemed real, he always felt as if he was awake, but he wasn’t.
The problem was he had experienced it, and even though in his head he knew it was a dream, he still felt the experience. He strained to listen for the sound of those crab feet on the cold floor.
Carefully he got out of bed and looked under his bunk and under the bunk on the other side. There was nothing there.
He climbed back in, and Meph jumped off and disappeared under the bed.
Don’t chase it, he thought, listening for the sound of it, picturing it crouched, trying to burrow into the concrete. Knowing it wasn’t real. But the cat would be attracted, like the bomb at the house. Only wandering mines moved, how much more attractive for Meph.
It was all the talk of
war today, it had started him thinking and now he could not get the war out of his head. Nothing to do but lie down and hope he could sleep, hope he had no more dreams.
Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them, like in a sandy wash. And they settled down in the sand and rock, burying themselves, till sand covered them. And then you went away, and the enemy entered the area. And after a preset time, if nothing had crossed them, they dug themselves up, scuttled across the Kalahari on their crab legs, found a new place and buried themselves again. You could preset the range, bury a beacon to keep them fairly close—but the beacon could alert the enemy, so mostly they were set at random, set so as not to wander more than a couple of hundred meters from where they were first buried.
Once, one of his men had been sleeping out on patrol, and he had woken because he heard a scuttling. He’d thought scorpion, and froze. And out of the sand rose a wandering mine. Faceless little thing on six legs, with sand trickling off it like water as it rose. It had stood, and he had known that if it came towards him, he might set it off by being an obstacle. He was afraid to call out, some of them homed in on noise. He couldn’t even warn the others.
And then it had scuttled out into the desert.
That is what had caused his dream. David hadn’t thought of that story in years, but now it had risen out of his memory like the mine out of the sand.
It took him a long time to get to sleep.
* * *
He was stupid and sleepy the next morning, following Santos into the cafeteria. Santos had been up half the night with the société, but nothing bothered him. He was nineteen or twenty and he could do without sleep.
“You know, Kim, if you going to be a jock, I think you should at least come. I’m not saying you need to be an initiate or nothing, just come and see what it is, you know?”
“Maybe next Sunday,” David said.
“Oh fuck,” Santos said. “No coconut bread. They always have coconut bread on Monday, what the fuck is this?”
David got his tray and looked for a place to sit. He saw Patel, and then he saw Mayla.
“Yeah, that’s the new woman, the Chinese one,” Santos said. “See, she don’t look Chinese, but she got a Chinese name. She’s way too tall, man. And Big Andre say she’s pretty, but I don’t think she’s so hot. She ain’t bad or nothing, you might still want to get to know her.”
“I already know her,” David said.
“Yeah?” Santos said.
David walked over to the table, because he didn’t know what else to do. Mayla was sitting with Patel, eating, and she didn’t look up, didn’t see him. Still, she had to be here looking for him, unless she was here because of a loan? No, he couldn’t believe she would be here to make a loan.
He stopped, trying to decide; if she was here because of a loan, then the best thing to do would be avoid her. Just because she was here didn’t mean that the police knew where he was.
Then she looked up at him.
So he had to walk over.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said.
“Sit down,” Patel said. Patel had never acted like she even remembered stripping him in the locker, but he remembered and it always made him flush.
“How are you?” Mayla asked.
“I’m fine.”
“You look good,” she said.
“You know Kim?” Patel said.
“Did you come looking for me?” he asked.
Mayla shook her head and her hair swung. “I got a job. I’m working as a jock.”
He didn’t know what to say to that.
“I lost my job at the bank,” she said. “There was a takeover, Marincite Corp. bought out First Hawaiian.”
“Are you working in the accounting, here?” What would she be doing, running the accounting department here? But that would not be a very good job for someone like her, would it?
“No,” she said, impatient. “I’m working as a fish jock. But I need to talk to you about some things.”
“This is crazy,” he said.
“I needed a job,” she said, with peculiar emphasis. “And I needed a job like you have. I needed to do what you did. I needed to get away from the bank and everything. You remember all the trouble.” She said it as if he should understand something, but he didn’t.
Patel started out of her seat, “I need to look for my husband—”
“No,” David said. “We’ll get together, after lunch.” He needed to get away, before she called him David. “I’ll talk to you then. But I have to eat in a hurry, then get some things done, okay?”
He needed to think.
She nodded. “That’s okay,” she said.
* * *
He expected to talk to Mayla, but MacKenzie, the foreman, found him and told him Naranji wanted him in the lab. Working in the lab meant an eight-hour shift, with no time after lunch to talk.
He spent the morning helping Naranji dismantle the freshwater recyc system for the salmon project. Naranji joked about how they were doing engineering instead of chemistry. In the U.S., where he got his education, someone else would have done this.
David wondered if it was safe to go to Port Authority and buy a ticket to Miami. He could head up to Virginia, to his aunt and uncle in Blacksburg and they would loan him the money to get home to France. He would be safe. Or maybe he could stay in the U.S. for awhile. They would sponsor him, he could get a job. But with Mayla here, could the police be far behind? He’d probably be arrested.
If he could just get out of this country. This little trap of a country.
Should he quit and try to hide in the city? He could leave Meph, he thought the cat would be okay. But he didn’t know when he could catch the sub back to Julia and he was afraid to ask Naranji how often the subs left. It sounded like such a suspicious question. The fish farm had seemed perfect, because it was isolated. He should have thought that it was like the city, only one way in and one way out.
Usually he and Naranji waited until after the jocks ate to get lunch, when it wasn’t so crowded, but he needed to get to Mayla. “I need to talk to one of the jocks,” he told Naranji.
“You want to eat now?” Naranji said. “Okay.”
The dining hall was loud and busy, he could hear the noise as he walked down the hall. It would be too crowded to talk. He wouldn’t find out anything. But he could tell her he was working until 5:00, that he’d see her after dinner. Maybe he would be arrested by then, he would see what her expression was when he told her. See if he should run.
He didn’t see her for a long moment, then he did, in tunic and tights, like all the jocks. She was sitting with Patel again.
“Mayla,” he said, and she looked up from her food.
“Hi,” she said, tired-sounding. Her hair was wet from the shower and she looked drawn from the morning’s dive. It was then that he realized she really was working as a jock. Which made no sense as far as he could see.
“I’m working in the lab today,” he said. “I can’t meet you until after dinner.”
“They told me out at the site,” she said.
Had she called him David? She had to have, she wouldn’t know to call him Kim. His stomach clenched. He would have to leave, have to get out of here. People would be wondering, it wasn’t good when people wondered.
“How are you,” he said lamely.
“Tired,” she said and smiled. “I feel like I’ve already worked a whole day and it’s not even half over.”
He nodded. Why? Why are you doing this? But he couldn’t ask, not in front of Patel. He didn’t know what she had told people.
“I’ll see you after dinner,” he said.
He got a tray and went to sit with Santos.
“Hey, Kim,” Santos said, “how well you know her?”
David shrugged.
Santos and the jocks around him grinned.
“I worked with her, before,” David said.
“Yeah?” Sa
ntos said. “She work good?” Everybody laughed.
“I don’t know,” David said.
His stomach ached. He couldn’t taste his lunch. Maybe he would go back to the lab and tell Naranji that he didn’t feel well, but then what would he do for the afternoon, lie in his bunk? After lunch the jocks would all be back, he could talk to Mayla.
Why was she working as a fish jock? He couldn’t understand.
He went back to the lab.
* * *
She was running, like him. He wanted to scream at her. She was telling him what she did the day she left. “I slept behind a dumpster,” Mayla said. She looked ragged after her dive, washed out and exhausted. She had slept before dinner (new jocks always slept between second shift and dinner) but she still looked drained.
“Why do you become a fish jock?” he asked.
“Because it’s safe,” she said.
He laughed, a sharp bark. “There is nothing safe here,” he said. “People get hurt, get killed. Pyroxin is bad for you.”
“I didn’t mean safe that way, I meant that they haven’t found you.”
He shouldn’t have called her. He had done it, regretted he’d done it, then put it out of his mind.
“So now you are here because you think we can both hide?” he said.
She nodded, “I had to get away, and I knew you had.”
“So you are Mayla Ling, here? You use your own name?”
“My workcard has my name on it—oh,” she rubbed her face with her hands. “It’s not my regular workcard, that was destroyed with the house. They can’t just read everything off it. So they just fill in some information and wait for the real workcard to come through, only I’ll never get the real workcard.”
“So they report your name to the government, for air tax and income tax and then the blue and whites come knocking, eh?” he said.
“The government is too big, it’s too much of a mess,” she said, “they’ll never connect it.” But she sounded uncertain.
He did not say anything. She would get more frightened the more she thought about it, and then they would have to leave. Maybe Santos could suggest another job? No, better not, Santos talked too much, always talking. Santos would tell someone.
Half the Day Is Night Page 28
