Half the Day Is Night

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  But once the Cross had entered his sky he couldn’t get it out. It hung there, brilliant, not quite symmetrical. Perhaps because in the time he’d spent south of the equator he’d been outside at night, he’d considered the African sky. Now that sky—or some sky he had imagined containing the Southern Cross—spread broad and vast above him. He turned on his side. He was not under that sky, he was in a room a couple of hundred meters under the ocean. He touched Meph whose breath swelled his tiny belly. So fragile. David clasped his hand over Meph’s belly, imagining what he could do, how vulnerable Mephisto was. He tried to feel those tiny ivory ribs. Tried to feel even fear in that to bring him back to the room. But the sky was still above him. He made himself feel the bed that was only warm on the right. His heart was pounding, he was sweating. His body was doing all the things a body did when it was terrified, but he didn’t feel any fear. Oh God, he hated this. His heart pounding. Maybe he was having a heart attack? No, he knew he was not having a heart attack, just afraid. Afraid of the dark. Give in to the fear, let the fear swallow him, maybe he would come out the other side? The bed was perched on a kopje in the Transvaal, night-colored bluegreen, under the Southern Cross. Around him, miles of dry grass, the bandu, and twisted enkeldoring, dry branches rubbing and whispering in the hot January wind. He opened his eyes but it was so dark it was as if they were closed. The stars were distant, white, cold. So far away, so old. He was so small. He couldn’t do anything with the fear.

  He sat up, Meph mewed, he fumbled until he found the touchplate on the lamp. Light. A room with cold, bluish-green walls. He pushed back the blankets, scooped Meph up and held the sleepy and irritated kitten against his chest, crooning to him in French and English.

  “You son of a bitch,” he whispered to Meph, “you sweet fucking bastard, Mephisto, ma petit merde.”

  * * *

  By Monday morning he had to get out. Meph tried to get past him but he got the door shut. The curtains stirred and Meph was on the windowsill watching, mouth opened soundlessly, pink and demanding. It was not fair. If he felt cooped up, then Meph felt cooped up, too.

  “Life is not fair,” he told the kitten. Meph wailed again, eerily silent behind the glass, and then batted at a drop of condensation running on the outside of the window.

  It was so damp, air he could smell and faintly taste. Musty, old socks air. The air wasn’t as good as it was on the upper levels. The man who rented the rooms was walking the length of the pink concrete hall, spraying fungicide again. The smell was faintly sweet. “Good morning, Señor Park,” the man said.

  David nodded and smiled and walked the other way. He had registered as Kim Park. He had said he was Korean—Park was a Korean name—but the man probably didn’t know a Korean from a Zulu.

  He had to decide what to do.

  The smartest thing to do was to do nothing, to lie low and wait. To be invisible. But he didn’t have a passport and if he was going to get out of Caribe he’d have to come up with one. Somewhere he thought he could buy a passport—but then he suspected he didn’t have enough money to buy a black market passport. He did have enough to pay for passage to the U.S. If he could get to the U.S. he could explain to his uncle in Blacksburg and maybe they could help him get home?

  Maybe if he waited the Caribbean police would arrest Anna Eminike and he would be cleared.

  Then again, maybe he would win the national lottery.

  Best to lie low for a few days and count on the inefficiency of the blue and whites. They would lose interest. Although they would probably flag his name so if he tried to buy a ticket for a sub they would be alerted.

  There was a street name painted on the wall at the corner. Bestinata. Nothing was level here, streets did not feed into one another but were all on different levels. The whole area was haphazard: a true, three-dimensional maze. At the corner he climbed five concrete steps to a broader gray corridor going left and right.

  No reason to choose left or right, so he went left. Cracked concrete “street,” children playing crouched between plastic trash bins. They had a flowered rag on a string to make a wall, making smaller spaces in the narrow corridor. Some of the lights didn’t work and he walked through a dim place. The air smelled of garbage and old socks. A little girl looked around the rag to watch him walk by. Her hair was in tight braids against her head. Her eyes were solemn and she rested her tiny hands on her dirty knees, her elbows stuck out like wings. Her sweater had faded blue and gilt butterflies on it.

  That street emptied onto Plaza Del Malabarista. He had to go down three steps to get to the Plaza, it was about the width of a regular city street, and ran about six blocks.

  The air smelled even worse here: unwashed bodies and curry over the dirty sock odor. The Plaza was rimmed with shops and the streets were full of vendors with vegetables set out on tables, homemade clothes on blankets, stalls that sold Indian food. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He looked in shop windows; a pharmacy advertised antibiotics in bright foil envelopes, chrome and red and blue. Textiles piled like a still life, bright gaudy fabric patterned in gilt butterflies for saris and lamé for dance dresses.

  Two girls and a boy were leaping into a square of walkway and leaping off, giggling. The littlest girl looked about five, she leaped and looked up at something invisible to David, shrieked and covered her mouth and jumped away. Some advertisement activated when they came within range. The boy said something to the littlest girl and she hesitated, tortured by her desire to test again. She was at the stage when children are all legs. She leaped again—an exaggerated jump where she kicked up her red plastic shoes—and stood for a moment, watching. The oldest girl looked at David coming towards them. For a moment he wondered if he should cut through the vendors in the square, but the older girl called, “Aloka!” and they all ran.

  He almost walked around the square where they had been playing; he didn’t like VR advertisements. At home it was illegal to have them on a sidewalk or street. Here he figured that the lasers that tracked the viewer’s eyes to feed the visuals weren’t calibrated or maintained very often. He knew they were low power and that people didn’t really get blinded in freak accidents.…

  What had the children found so fascinating? He stepped onto the sidewalk and looked up at the shop.

  Marquesa Mariposa. Was it a beauty parlor? A teenaged girl appeared on the sidewalk—or rather, not quite on the sidewalk, the image wasn’t angled precisely and her feet were a little above the ground. She crooned something to him in Spanish although she was wearing a robe more like a kimono, gauzy blue with veins of gold and silver in some sort of pattern. She opened the robe, and it spread like wings, butterfly wings, ah yes, mariposa meant butterfly—

  She was nearly naked under the wings, just a gold g-string and a kind of silver bikini top that was more like two strands of fabric in an “x” across her chest barely wide enough to cover her nipples.

  It was a VR peep parlor. Mariposas, “pretty girls.” He almost jumped in his hurry to get off the square and looked around to see if anyone had seen him standing there like some old man looking for a thrill. He couldn’t tell if anyone had been looking at him. His face burned.

  Go back to the room, he thought.

  But he couldn’t face that, either.

  Stairs cut up to his left between two shops so he headed up them, a long narrow flight of concrete stairs that left him breathless. Another street of residences. He was afraid he’d get lost, but if he just headed straight he figured he could always turn around and get back to the Plaza. The streets weren’t ever very long here, anyway.

  This street felt different, the flats were mostly whitewashed instead of blue or yellow and the people were Creole rather than Indian. He felt foreign. Women leaned on windowsills chattering in Creole, but they stopped talking when he passed and stared. Children stared at him, too.

  This street emptied out on another shopping plaza, smaller than the first. Painted high on the wall it said Paris
h Jeramie. Nothing here he hadn’t already seen except that the street vendor sold coconut bread and stew. Maybe he would walk around once and then he would go back to the Plaza and buy some tortillas and beans for lunch. Maybe some rice. And catfood.

  The storefronts were whitewashed or pale blue, some with rainbows and snakes around the doors. The paint peeled from the damp concrete. He wished he were home. The homesickness came overwhelming and sharp and his eyes watered with the intensity of it. He wanted to go to the port, buy a ticket and get on the sub, be home in a day, have his life back.

  Foolish thing to do, but he wanted to so badly. Maybe he could just go to the port and see what tickets cost. He could apply to the French Consulate and get his passport replaced, maybe the police would not notice, they were so sloppy here—

  All it would take was one flag in the system.

  Plazoleta D’Imagen. Reality Parlor. Naive illustrations leaped around the door, green men carrying blazing guns, little more than stick figures, women with exaggerated breasts swooning in lovers’ arms. He was not interested, he would go home and watch the vid.

  He turned around to head back to the stairs and saw the blue and whites, three of them, coming through the crowd. Just walking, purposeful. Without a thought he stepped into the reality parlor, pushing aside the black curtain. The girl behind the counter looked up.

  “How much for a booth?” he said, because she was looking at him. Because he had come in here.

  She stared at him, too. “One hour? Three hours?” she asked.

  “An hour.”

  “Six cerciorcados,” she said holding up the requisite number of fingers as if he might not understand her.

  He gave her the money and she pulled a cardboard box out from under the counter and found him a pair of gloves that fit. She gave him a cotton haircover, too. The exit was at his back, he was listening for the blue and whites to pass, but the street sounds were muted by the curtain. He didn’t think the blue and whites had been looking for him since they had not acted like they saw him or cared. He should have just walked past them. He pushed through a second curtain—almost running into a tall, long-armed boy who looked about sixteen.

  The booth was small, three walls made of plastic partitions and the fourth the concrete back wall of the building. There was a worn, black plastic visor, the padding and the forehead was split and stuffing bulged out. And there was a treadmill and a set of handlebars hung from the ceiling.

  What was he doing here? He sat down on the edge of the treadmill. Maybe he would just sit here for a few moments. He was just nervous, that was all. He would go back to the room.

  He could try the games here, see what was on the network.

  The visor was too big and felt heavy, he wondered how many people had worn it? He was glad for the cotton hair-cover. He stepped onto the treadmill and grabbed the handlebars suspended from the ceiling. He pulled the visor down.

  Then he saw a room. Most of the room was a sketch-work of line, not a real room. He could see his schematic hands glowing like phosphorescent bones. Hanging in the middle of the room were the glowing words CREOLE, ENGLISH, SPANISH.

  He raised his glowing hand and pointed to English with a bony finger.

  “Welcome to the Parish Jeramie Reality Parlor. Please give your system name.” The voice was female, cool and husky, American.

  His system name when he was a kid had always been Lezard because that was the name of a character from the vid. “Lezard,” he said.

  “That configuration is new to this system. Do you have another name for this system?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Please enter your personal information on the index.” A schematic keyboard appeared in front of him and a form. Name: he typed “Kim Park.” The gloves had feedback so he could feel resistance when he typed, as if he was hitting keys. Age: “34,” Sex: “Male.”

  Address: He skipped that. Body Configuration: At the top of the form it said he could ask for a catalogue so he did.

  The room suddenly fleshed out and the cool, female voice said, “A catalogue requires full system, this time will be counted as part of your hour.”

  He didn’t care, he was just killing time.

  The catalogue was the size of a magazine, and the gloves were too clumsy to turn the pages so he had to press the icons at the top. There was an icon for male—circle and arrow, an icon for female—circle and cross, an icon of a doctor’s caduceus, an icon that said ZOO, an icon of a gear, and an icon of an arrow pointing to the right to page through. He pressed the icon for males.

  And laughed at the first body. Big, black, broad-shouldered, immensely handsome body-builder type. Not interested. He paged through the stock bodies pretty quickly; a couple of vid stars and some model-looking types, a Haitian street boy, a Latino street boy, a white street boy, an Indian street boy, a Native American street boy, an oriental street boy. A soldier in camouflage, sports figures, a wizard in robes, a knight in chainmail, cliché after cliché. Then exaggerated types, metal bodies: chrome, silver, bronze, aluminum white, matte black, metallic red, blue, green. Leather bodies, neon bodies, negatives.

  He ran completely through the males without finding any image he could imagine assuming and found himself in the female section looking at Denise Deren, the American VR star, who he admitted was very pretty with her green eyes and pale hair but who he also could not imagine wearing, so he pressed the caduceus.

  A doctor looked at him out of an American-style surgical p-suit. “Normal human or other?” the doctor asked.

  He didn’t want to be chrome so he typed “yes” and for gender he typed male. Gave a height of 1.8 meters—hell, he might as well be tall. A weight, and a schematic of a generic male body appeared. He increased the weight by five kilos, decided that made the body look a little like the body builder on the first page and took it off. He was presented with a range of skin colors. He thought a moment, chose something dark. It would be nice to blend in. That meant curly black hair, close to the head. A presentation of eyes and noses and mouths and he chose pretty quickly. Then clothes and he just picked a sweater and tights. Normal, just look normal.

  “Save this body as Lezard?”

  “Okay,” he said. And he had a body. The gloves were gone.

  “Continue browsing?”

  He started to say no then thought of the zoo. That would be interesting.

  The first page was a dragon, sea green with red eyes and huge wings. He laughed again. No, he did not want to be a dragon. Not a demon with a face like leather and bat-wings. Not a winged horse, either. A whale, a green-tailed mermaid, an angel (luminous and quite pretty in an androgynous way but certainly not him.) A tall elf with long silver hair and green eyes and pointed ears. Alien creatures, part human, part leopard, or lizard or horse. A snake with beautiful scales like bright green and copper glass. Funny figures, fat old men and Charlie Chaplin and cartoon people. Then traditional animals.

  An animal, that was appealing. He would like to be an animal. Not a lizard, despite his choice of names. He paged through thoughtfully. An owl, a hawk, a bat, a gazelle, a lion, a horse, a number of kinds of dogs, a wolf, a cat.…

  A cat. He had never really thought of himself as catlike, but maybe a cat. But then he would have no hands. Maybe not.

  The next section was all machines: planes and tanks and cars. He did not want to be a car, either.

  He sighed and closed the catalogue.

  Now there was a door in the wall. He grabbed the handlebars and took a step, the treadmill activated with a slight lurch and he was walking towards the door. The door opened.

  * * *

  It had been a long time since he did anything like this, maybe since the militaire. He had done simulations in training, there, but most of those had either been at consoles or in body suits. It was a little strange remembering that if he turned the handlebars he turned, even though his feet kept going straight on the treadmill.

  The door opened on a playground. It di
dn’t look real, wasn’t supposed to. Everything in it was geometric, smooth, perfect in silver and red, surrounded by water and plashing with fountains. The pillars reflected his image in curving chrome. It all looked dated, like something that had been popular when he was a kid.

  It was crowded but places like this were always a little crowded. If there weren’t enough people the system generated a crowd. He looked up and the top of the fountains were crowned with blue gas flames. He sighed.

  Actually getting here was a lot less interesting than picking a persona. In picking a persona there was so much potential. Like getting dressed for a party.

  He looked until he found the access portals in the pillars in the center of the playground. (They had huge red metal balls bouncing up and down on top of them.) He could probably leave now, he had only ducked in because of the police, who were not even looking for him. Paranoia. He could go back to the apartment and Meph.

  And do what?

  “Time available?” he asked.

  42.27, 42.26, 42.25, 42.24, 42.23. The time left blinked in front of him for five seconds and then disappeared.

  Might as well play a game or something. He started forward and the treadmill started under his feet. Strange sense of being two places at once, in the playground and in the cubicle wearing the visor and gloves.

  The systems available were listed at the access portals and there were people standing there reading. He had to kind of peer around. Some of the titles were dark, he supposed those were either not up and running or required membership. Flight simulations, adventure games with wizards, romances, combat games, after the eco disaster games, mysteries, a pirate simulation/adventure that had been popular when he was a kid.…

  “We need a sixth,” said a beautiful Latino woman with an eyepatch. The fact that she was beautiful didn’t mean anything, anybody could be beautiful. “Is there anyone here interested in making a sixth?”

  “Everything here is chaff,” said a tall blond American male with a distinct Caribbean accent.