Half the Day Is Night (36 page)

He jerked his head and she followed him to the side table where apparently negotiations went on. “I'm not hiring right now,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. She had never thought of this. What was he doing here if he wasn't hiring?

“I'm looking for a couple of handlers, are you a handler?”

She thought about saying yes but she didn't know what a handler was and that wouldn't work.

“I, ah, I need some experience,” she said.

He smirked. “Yes?”

She knew what he was thinking, that it was obvious that she wasn't a fish jock. “I can maybe pay a learning fee?” she said. She had rehearsed this in her head. “I need the work and I need to get some experience, but I know that you shouldn't, or, I mean, the farm shouldn't train me for free?”

“How much?” he asked.

Madre de Diós.
“500cr,” she said.

He shook his head.

“1000,” she said.

He said. “Let's see some papers on who you are. I don't hire people in trouble.”

She pulled out her workcard.

“It's temporary,” he said, suspicious.

“I was robbed,” she said. “They took my purse, everything. It's taking forever to get a new card.”

“Why do you want to be a fish jock, lady?” he said. “You no fish jock.”

She didn't know what to say. “I need to get out of the city.”

He studied her for a moment. “You got man trouble?”

She looked down at the little table. “He beats me,” she said, her voice cracking with the lie. “He said if I ran away he'd find me.” Jesus, she couldn't act, and her face flooded red with embarrassment.
He beats me?

But the rep nodded, his face suddenly softer. “Okay, lady. 1000cr.”

She reached down for her bag but he had already stood up. “Tip the bartender,” he said. “Be at the shuttle dock Sunday night.

She went back to her table and carefully folded the 1000cr into a 5cr bill. It looked too thick to be a tip but she kept it hidden in her hand and walked back to the bar. She was even more embarrassed, now. She couldn't wait to get out, to go back to her hotel. The bartender was busy so she had to wait a long minute, but finally he came back down to her end. “Yes, ma'am?”

“Thanks,” she said, and handed him the money.

“Good luck,” he said.

13

Transfer

“You were in the war in South Africa, right?” Santos said.

David nodded. Sunday night, and they were hanging around in the men's bunkroom after dinner. The television was on at one end, but they were all in the space between Santos' bunk and the next bunk.

“Did you ever kill anyone?”

Too many weekends spent playing war games. They had been logged in five hours today and David could still feel the phantom weight of the helmet. But it had been Argentina again and the light was so wonderful.

Had he ever killed anyone? He remembered firing into the face of a startled Prot across a city street. In Durban. The Prot had seemed right there, so close to him, but he had not stopped running and he didn't know if he had hit the man or not. “I don't know. It is not like that,” he said.

“I guess you can't tell in a firefight,” Santos said.

David shook his head. Even firefights were not what Santos thought.

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.”