Half the Day Is Night (34 page)

The door opened on a small office, two desks and filing cabinets and paper and barely room to turn around. She smelled incense. (Didn't people use that to cover the smell of marijuana? The blue and white wasn't Haitian, but that didn't mean they couldn't use marijuana.) The blue and white gestured to a chair.

He didn't say why he had brought her to this office, he just sat down and printed out a sheet of paper and handed it to her. She read it again but she didn't really connect the words to meaning.

“You should sign,” he said.

And she did.

*   *   *

At the office of foreign services Mayla requested permission to go abroad. The application was familiar, she had been abroad before. She wondered why they gave people pencils. She filled out her passport number.
Reason for Trip.
For the last ten years she had been putting business.

Reason for Trip.
She could say it was to see her family in the States. She could buy a plane ticket for Hawaii, pretend she was going to visit her cousins in Honolulu. She just needed to get to the States, she could apply for a conversion from a tourist visa to a resident visa once she was there. She couldn't do it here, if she went to the U.S. Consulate in Caribe the government would know. They monitored people who applied for visas.

Reason for Trip.
“Vacation.” Never explain a lot when you are lying. It's a clear sign that something is not right.

She stood in line behind an overweight woman whose back had rolls of fat at her shoulder blades. The woman's hair was artificially straightened, a curtain of shining black hair. Mayla wondered where she was trying to go, was she trying to visit family in the islands?

She wished the U.S. were like other countries and she could have applied for a visa through the mail, although her mail might be monitored for all she knew. Or she might just be paranoid.

The office was too small, too crowded. There were only four windows open. It was damp. People had to crowd because there wasn't enough room for the lines to form.

She could just leave the application and go back to her grandfather's.

Getting permission to leave didn't mean she actually had to leave. It just meant that she could. And she could go, take a vacation and come back.

The big woman in front of her was at the window, but Mayla couldn't see around her to know what she was doing. Not that it mattered.

Waiting. Waiting was getting harder. She wished she could do something, these days she had too much time to think.

The big woman turned, her application still in her hand. The big woman was scowling. There was no place to get out of her way so she shoved against Mayla to get past.

Time to get out, Mayla thought, but she wasn't sure if she meant this office or Caribe.

“Identification?” the woman asked.

Mayla handed over her temporary ID. (The regular one had gone with the house. The replacement hadn't come yet.)

The woman in the window said something inaudible and pecked out the information on the temporary. If it had been a regular card she could have scanned the information. Of course, in the U.S. it would have been tied to her thumbprint, no card at all.

“Application,” the woman said and Mayla handed it to her.

She pecked that information in, too.
“Diós,”
she said, after a moment, exasperated. She pecked the information in a second time. Then she sighed. “Your application is turned down.”

“It is?” Mayla said. “Oh. I'm sorry. Um, why?”

“Your file is flagged, in order to travel you must clear it with the Security Office. You'll need to forward all queries to this address.” She handed Mayla a sheet of paper.

“Thank you,” Mayla said.

There was no place for the people behind her to step aside so she had to push her way out through the crowd. She wasn't going to query, it was probably bad enough that she had even tried. Someone in the Security Office would probably notice that she had tried to leave the country.

She didn't know what any of this meant.

*   *   *

Maybe it was just routine. Maybe her file had been flagged because of the bomb in the house. She sat down at the console in her grandfather's office to compose a letter of inquiry but she couldn't think of any way to word it that wasn't incriminating.

She addressed the letter. She stared.
I am writing to inquire about a permit to visit family in Miami.
That seemed innocuous, didn't it? Or would it draw attention to her? She had already drawn attention to herself by filing for permission. If she just let it drop, would the note just go in her file somewhere? Maybe they wouldn't pay much attention, after all, her name probably just went on a report. There was data coming at them from all directions and she probably just got lost in the sea of information. But if she wrote the letter she might raise another flag. Too many flags and someone would notice her again. Best to lay low, hope that they had other things more interesting going on. Wait, and eventually she could leave. On the other hand, maybe the fact that she had applied and wasn't querying the security office would be read as a sign of guilt—

The console rang a call and she jumped and slapped the receive. The console was set so it could be heard from the hall and it was amazingly loud, if she'd thought she wouldn't have hit it.

No video. “Hello?” she said, she could not hear anything in her voice, but her heart, her heart, was her heart pounding in her voice? No video. She put her finger on the record and pushed it in. The indicator came on the screen, silent numbers clicking the seconds.

No answer.

She sat, thinking about cutting it off. Blue and whites playing mindgames?
La Mano de Diós.
She reached out and almost touched the cutoff. The air sounded open, like a seashell without the sea.

“Hello?” a man's voice said.

“Yes?” she said. She waited at the cutoff.
La Mano de Diós,
surely. Leave me alone, she thought. The call would be monitored, the seconds clicked on, 12 … 13.… The blue and whites would think her an accomplice—

“May I speak to Mayla?”

Strange accent, familiar. “This is she.”

“Mayla?” The video came on and it was David Dai.

For a moment she was stunned. He was dead. No, she thought, it wasn't him, it was Anna Eminike who was dead.

“Hello,” he said, wary. He'd cut his hair. It made him look different, younger.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you okay?” Oh God, were the blue and whites monitoring?

“I'm okay,” he said, “are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“Okay,” he said.

Where are you?
she wanted to say, but if the blue and whites were monitoring she didn't want him to tell her, but she wanted to know. They sat looking at each other. There were no real clues behind him, just a wall. He was sitting, wearing a diver's top, but a lot of people wore those. The wrist fasteners looked like the heavy ones, not the ones people used for everyday swimming. “I quit the bank,” she said.

“You quit?” he said.

“It was sold, to Marincite. It was taken over, actually. It was my fault, partly.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

He was the only person who had asked that. She felt suddenly and profoundly grateful, and her eyes welled. But she wasn't going to cry. “I don't know.”

He sat silent again, but a different silence, the silence of someone trying to think of what to say about something.

How did you hide?
she wanted to ask.
I need to get away.
She couldn't even ask him if he was in Caribe, although she supposed he was or he would have told her where he was. The blue and whites couldn't touch him in France, could they?

“I can't really talk,” he said.

I need to escape, she thought. “Wait,” she said, her mind racing, wanting to ask him something, if the blue and whites asked she could always say she assumed they were monitoring and wanted to give them time to establish a trace, “are you really all right?”

“Kim,” someone called, another man. “Is this the spawning info?”

“I am on a call!” David snapped.

“I need to know about the salmon trays, what is the bio-compatibility, where is the rating?”

“I have to go,” David said to her.

“Are you working?” she asked, desperate.

“I'll call you again,” he said, but he was lying. And he cut off the connection.

The screen blanked except for the indicator, which recorded the time of the conversation, one minute, ten seconds. It had seemed longer.

She played it back. It went fast when she played it back. She watched him, adjusting her memory to his image, she had not remembered exactly the way his eyelids were, without creases. Memory was important, untrustworthy. Tim had seen him get on the bus, and he had disappeared.

Where was he? Some place that they used salmon trays, whatever salmon trays were. And spawning. Probably a fish farm.

She called up a listing, printed out all the fish farms. She looked at all of them, but didn't know what to do next. She didn't know if the blue and whites were monitoring or not. They couldn't monitor everybody on their lists, could they? Or maybe they recorded it all, but how could they screen it? Even with some very sophisticated screen they would get more than they could look at.

Or they would be here.

She picked up the list and went up to her room. She pulled a couple of tights out of her drawers and a couple of sweaters and underwear. No suits. Strange not to take suits. What are you going to do, Mayla? You are going to run.

She took her cards, her account access, her temporary work ID. The good one was gone with the house, but that was good because it had ID, work history, med insurance information coded on it, this one had nothing but her name and old address.

She didn't take much, just a few things. She walked out of the house with a shoulder bag with the list of fish farms stuffed in with her clothes. Outside she had to walk awhile, but unlike David she didn't have to catch a bus to get to a bank machine. She wondered if her account would be frozen.

She dropped her card in, if it took it she would keep going, but it just asked her for her name and she said, “Mayla Ling.”

“Read this code phrase,” it said.

On the screen it said, “Talk so people will listen, and listen so people will talk.” Which was a new phrase. She read it. At the bank they bought all their voice recognition equipment from the States, and quarterly they got updated codes to make things more difficult for counterfeiters.

“Please repeat,” it said.

They had denied access. She repeated the phrase, wondering if she should just run.

But the screen asked her to pick a transaction.

“Balance check.”

She had a pretty decent amount available.

“Withdraw.”

She took all but 100cr.

Then she stood for a moment, looking all around. She caught her reflection in the window of a shop and saw herself standing out, tall anglo woman, looking. So she walked. She needed to find a place to make a call. She needed a public exchange, even if it was to make just local calls. She should have known where one was, she'd seen them all her life, places where people who couldn't afford service in their own place went to make calls. She needed to go down a few levels.

Right, she had something like 12,000cr stuffed in her shoulder bag and she was going to go
down
a couple of levels. A white woman. Might as well just get herself a jacket and paint a big bullseye on the back.

She walked to the shopping plaza and waited for a bus. David Dai had gotten on a bus. She would bet he had gone down, too. So she would go down. Wasn't that the instinct of animals, to go to earth when trying to hide?

She waited a long time, standing in line with women who came to the plaza to work—girls with elaborate hair and jewelry and women with string bags with fruit in them. The bus that chugged up to the edge of the plaza was a taptap, sky blue and swirling with serpentine lines of neon colors and dots. They looked as if they had been painted on with a broad paintbrush. She'd seen them all her life, but she'd never gotten on one.

She paid her coin and sat down in the middle. The bus started sluggishly and the driver pulled on something, some lever, and the engine roared. She smelled the stink of petrol. Petrol was supposed to be restricted but the taptaps had been running her whole life. She looked out the window.

The taptap ran behind shops so she saw concrete and doors and garbage dumpsters. Sometimes the way got so narrow that people flattened against the wall to let the tap-tap pass.

She wasn't in a hurry, not really. She wasn't going anywhere. But she wanted to get to a place to make some calls, so she could figure out what to do next. She tried to watch the backs of the shops to see an exchange, sometimes a door was open and a heavy brown woman would stand impassively, leaning against the door frame, one foot up. But inside was always darker than the lit street and she could never see.

The taptap turned onto a thoroughfare and it took her a moment to identify Revolution (which her grandfather still called Walter—if the blue and whites came would her grandfather think it was her fault?) They lumbered a few blocks on Revolution and then the bus heeled like a sailboat and U-turned into an interchange, a steep descent like a parking garage, rumbling in low gear against the transmission. Making their way down a level.

She rested her forehead against the glass, even though it was cold. She wished she could just find a place to stop for awhile. She had to be smart. She had to use her head, make herself do things her body didn't want to do. She wanted to go back to her grandfather's and go to bed.

The taptap didn't have any stops on the second or third level, but rumbled down to the fourth. She didn't know anything about the fourth level, she thought she had been there but she couldn't remember what for.