Half the Day Is Night Read online

  “Mayla?” Tim said. “Mayla? Are you awake?”

  The room was dark and she had no sense of time. “Do I have to go to work?” She had been asleep, but she had felt as if she wanted to turn over and couldn’t, as if the medication had immobilized her.

  “No,” Tim said, “someone is here to see you. It’s evening.”

  “I can’t see them,” Mayla said, but there was a black woman dressed completely in white standing behind Tim saying in a strong voice, “Mayla.”

  It was an authoritative voice, so strong it almost sounded as if the woman were on the surface. The woman was wearing sunglasses.

  “Hey! Wait a minute, would you!” Tim said.

  Mayla tried to think of who this woman was—La Mano De Diós? Had she finally been found? Her head was so thick she couldn’t move, couldn’t think, and it was just that as she had always suspected, Tim was completely useless.

  “Ms. Ling?” That was Paul, from work. What was he doing here? Maybe this was some sort of headache dream?

  “Ms. Ling isn’t feeling well,” Tim said, “you’ll have to leave.”

  Right, Mayla thought, throw the terrorists out. Let’s just be polite about all this, you’ll have to come back and shoot Ms. Ling later when she’s feeling better.

  “Mayla,” said the woman again. “Come out.” Mayla sat up and grabbed a robe.

  “Ms. Ling,” Paul said, “my sister has come to see you.”

  Oh shit. The floor was cold under her feet. The room was cold, and her face felt hot. She held her hands to her hot cheeks. Then she put on the robe—they were all standing in the doorway, but she didn’t care. The room was full of heavy air, but she didn’t feel as if she had to take very deep breaths. The medication made her body very calm, very still. She didn’t need much air. “I am sorry, Paul,” she said, standing at the door to the bedroom. “I really don’t feel very well.”

  “I know,” he said, “so I brought my sister.”

  If she concentrated, Mayla could feel the floor under her feet, but if she stopped concentrating, she forgot it was there. She didn’t feel at all light or insubstantial, but it was as if all the signals of her body were below the level of conscious recognition.

  “Excuse me,” said a man from the door.

  Everyone looked at him; Tim, Mayla, the woman with the sunglasses and Paul.

  “Ms. Ling,” said the man, “we are here to see if everything is all right?”

  She didn’t know who he was, either. “Everything is fine,” she said.

  “Perhaps these people are bothering you,” he suggested. He was a smooth-faced, innocuous-looking sort of person with thinning hair.

  “No,” she said. She almost said yes, except she didn’t know who the man was.

  “You can tell me who these people are?” he asked.

  “This is Paul, who works for me, and this is his sister.”

  The man studied them.

  “Who are you?” Paul’s sister asked.

  “I am a friend of the family,” the man said by way of good-bye, and reached out and pulled the door closed.

  “Your uncle,” the woman in sunglasses said to the closed door.

  It sounded like an insult. Her uncle. Oh, right, Marin Security, keeping watch. Well that was reassuring, even if it proved that the flat was monitored. She hoped they’d enjoyed listening to Tim’s soccer games.

  “You keep strange company,” the woman said to Paul, shaking her head. Then briskly to Mayla, “My brother says you have troubles.” She took off the sunglasses.

  “I don’t really feel well,” Mayla said, “but I appreciate your coming all this way.”

  The woman said. “You have to think about your life, girl.”

  Her head hurt, she wanted to lie down again and try to sleep.

  The woman stepped up to her and raised her hand. Mayla flinched away, but the woman laid her palm against Mayla’s forehead. Her skin was cool and Mayla closed her eyes. The woman took her hand away and when Mayla opened her eyes the woman handed her the sunglasses. “Legba will not mind,” she said.

  Legba, voudoun loa, guardian of the gates and crossroads, maker of great coups or spells. A magician, but not like the one in the street, the one in the ad. Papa Legba was an old man. Mayla put them on and the world was removed, dim and distant. Not as dark as she would have expected, they looked almost black from the outside but wearing them just made everything less bright. She should have realized that the woman was a mambo when she saw the sunglasses. Only voudoun and corner boys wore sunglasses, except in Del Sud where the light in the Del Sud dome was bright enough to need them.

  “Ah,” the woman said, “it’s nice, isn’t it.” She was older than Paul, a little older than Mayla, and she had fine wrinkles around her eyes that crinkled when she smiled.

  Paul smiled, shyly. Tim frowned. “Ms. Ling really isn’t feeling well,” he said.

  The woman didn’t pay any attention. Poor Tim, people tended to not pay any attention. “The sunglasses, they allow you to look at things without pain,” the woman said. “I think you need to look at things.”

  Actually, the glasses helped. The world was dim and her eyes didn’t hurt. “What do I need to look at?”

  “Why do you have a headache?”

  “Stress,” Mayla said. “The doctor said I am reacting to stress.”

  “So you have problems, too many problems, and you cannot deal with them. So you have a terrible headache and the world is simpler, you have only one problem. And there is only one thing you can do, go to bed. But the problem is that your other problems do not go away, you see? So now, you have to hold the problems off, so they are small, and look at them.”

  “Okay,” Mayla said.

  “That is what the drugs do, is it not?”

  “Yeah,” Mayla said. She thought she understood. She wasn’t sure she could explain it to someone else, but it made sense.

  “The thing is,” Paul’s sister said, “you cannot tell what is important and what is not.”

  Mayla nodded.

  Maybe you need help.

  Mayla thought Paul’s sister had said that but she wasn’t sure.

  Maybe you need help.

  “You can come and see me,” Paul’s sister said. “But for now you can keep the sunglasses. Tomorrow morning your headache will be gone. Papa Legba will take care of you.”

  “Okay,” Mayla said. Her hair felt as if it was wrong way against the part, tousled from sleep. She felt disordered. It would be nice if her headache would be gone the next morning. “Papa Legba,” she said, and then stopped, because she had wanted to ask something but she wasn’t sure what.

  “Yes?” said Paul’s sister.

  “Papa Legba, he’s an old man?”

  “Papa Legba is not a man, child,” Paul’s sister said.

  “I know,” Mayla said, “I mean, he’s not young, like the man in the ad, the sorcerer.” God, she was so confused she wasn’t making any sense.

  But Paul’s sister understood. She looked stern. “That is Carrefour, he is not for you. He is petro, he is the short way to power, the young man’s way.”

  “I know,” Mayla said, which wasn’t true, she meant that she knew he wasn’t for her.

  “You come see me,” she said. “You let Papa Legba take care of you. The other, he is not for you.”

  She watched them leave through the smoke dim light of the sunglasses. Then she got something to drink and went back to bed.

  When she woke up at five a.m. the next day, the headache was gone.

  * * *

  The headache stayed gone until almost three the next afternoon. Then it crept back, glinting at her off the polished surface of her desk. It hurt through her eyes first, sharp little shards that left residual ache.

  She closed her eyes and the ache stopped building.

  She could take a headache pill, but that would leave her stupid. She didn’t believe that Paul’s sister had made her headache go away, after all, she had gone to t
he doctor.

  She had the sunglasses in her briefcase to give to Paul. It would be stupid to put them on. Sitting at her desk wearing sunglasses. Either they would think she was very odd or they would think she was involved in voudoun. Being involved in voudoun would be a career limiter, it was unsophisticated.

  Maybe not here in Marincite, there had always been rumors about voudoun. Of course, all she had to do was picture Polly Navarro in sunglasses and she could guess how much substance there was to those rumors.

  She took them out, thinking to give them to Paul. They were plain sunglasses, very dark. Anonymous. Always appealing, anonymity. The plastic felt cold. She put them on for a moment and they stopped the glints from the desk from being painful.

  She had to brighten her monitor, but then she could see well enough to work.

  If someone came in she’d feel very stupid. She looked like an adolescent from the wrong level, the kind of girl who dyed her hair extraordinary colors. But then, Paul would buzz her and let her know if someone wanted to see her. So she kept them on.

  Paul caught her with them on, but he wasn’t going to think she was silly. “Paul,” she said, “what is your sister’s name?”

  “Layte,” he said. “Ms. Ling, when are you coming to see her?”

  “I will, as soon as I get a chance.”

  “She says you should come on Friday night.”

  Tomorrow night. “I can’t, I go back to Julia tomorrow night.”

  “You can go Saturday, can’t you?”

  She almost said she had appointments on Saturday, but she really didn’t. On the other hand, did she want to go to see his sister? She had never been really attracted to voudoun. Being Catholic had been more than enough.

  What would his sister say to her? She had said some pretty wild things the night before. “Okay,” Mayla said. “Friday night.”

  “I will come and get you, around six-thirty. Okay?”

  “Sure,” she said. Through sunglasses he almost looked green, as if he were underwater.

  “Bring a little money, for the donation,” Paul said.

  * * *

  “Great,” Tim said. “Just great.”

  Paul’s sister, Layte, lived in the section of the city called Kikuyue. It was a dark part of town, coming up from the chute people walked in and out of pools of shadow where the light strips were torn away. The air was wet and had that smell she associated with the lower levels of Julia, a mildewed, stale smell. The air didn’t seem to move at all.

  It made her skin crawl.

  “See scenic Marincite,” Tim muttered.

  Her sunglasses wouldn’t have been too out of place here. There seemed to be a lot of boys about upper-middle-school age just hanging around at the entrance to the chute. They all wore jackets with demon faces on the back or they had bare arms, long roping muscles exposed to the cold air. Pyroxin. Why didn’t security just arrest anyone who didn’t wear sleeves and test them for drugs? Except where would they put them all?

  Layte lived about fifteen minutes from the chute. Her place was part of a long row house, just a doorway and a couple of windows in a long row of doorways. But light spilled out the doorway, bright and yellow, not like the cool lights of the street at all. There were a lot of people standing outside: women in old-fashioned dresses of shining white jacquard and head scarves and men in thin white pants. Like something out of another century.

  “That means this is a traditional houngoun,” Mayla said to Tim.

  “So what are they going to do,” Tim said, “Slaughter a chicken in your honor?”

  “No,” she said, irritated. Although after she said it she didn’t know. Did they sacrifice animals? They did in historicals on the vid, but surely they didn’t anymore.

  There would be drums and dancing and people would be possessed. She was both curious and apprehensive about possession. Possession wasn’t real—or it was real, people actually believed it, and they went into an altered state—but it was a form of hysteria. Like speaking in tongues. Spirits didn’t take over your body.

  People were looking at them standing there in the street. She hadn’t even thought about what color clothes to wear so she was wearing gray leggings and a black sweater. Oh well, maybe they wouldn’t be allowed in.

  One of the men by the door cocked his finger, beckoning her. “You have been invited,” he said.

  “I’m sorry we’re not wearing white,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Are you a child of Guinee?” he asked.

  She didn’t know. She didn’t even know what the question meant.

  He shrugged, “Papa Legba won’t mind.”

  Someone took them inside. The front room was filled with people, and across the back was a long table with bread and covered dishes on it. She could smell sweet yams. There were rum bottles, too, she counted eleven. She wondered if the number meant something.

  “What did he mean?” Tim asked.

  “What?” she said.

  “‘Papa Legbo won’t mind?’”

  “Papa Legba,” she corrected. “Papa Legba is a loa. He’s the one that opens the gates.”

  Tim shook his head. “All I know about is zombies.”

  “Didn’t you ever see like the vid, Horsemen?” she asked. Everyone had seen Horsemen. But Tim hadn’t. “Do you know anything about possession?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen vids about exorcism and demons. This isn’t like Satanism, is it? I thought it was different.”

  “It’s not like Satanism,” she said. When she was growing up, the nuns had always said it was, but everybody knew it wasn’t. “The loa are like spirits, and they come and mount people’s heads, you know, they take over their bodies. But they’re not demons. They don’t hurt people.”

  “So we’re supposed to be possessed?” Tim asked.

  “No,” she said, “not us. We’re not, you know, like part of it. They don’t come to everyone.”

  “Okay,” Tim said, uncertain.

  Someone touched her on the arm and she looked around. A tiny woman was standing next to her. “It is good you came,” the woman said. It took her a moment to realize that the woman was Paul’s sister, Layte. She was smaller than Mayla had realized.

  “I have a donation,” Mayla said. She pressed the money into Layte’s hand. She had brought 50cr. She hoped it was enough.

  Layte nodded. “That’s good. Come with me.”

  Should she have given the woman that much money? Paul hadn’t said how much.

  The flat had two bedrooms, but the smaller bedroom was completely bare except for a little square table set in the middle, with a post from floor to ceiling behind it. The floor was painted dark red. Marincite maroon. “This is the sobagui,” Layte said. “Here, when I nod, you should take the jug, you see, and offer it to each of the four directions. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Mayla said. The post was dark, speckled with white paint. On the wall on the back there were three painted veve: a pattern of lines like wicker or ironwork; an elaborate cross, something like a grid or a gate with asterisks like flowers; and one quite clearly a ship.

  Veve were roads or gates, things the spirits used to come into this world. When she was in middle school they had been popular as jewelry. She’d had a little wire horse, a cheval, but they had to take them off when they got to school and hide them or the sisters would confiscate them.

  She wished she knew more about voudoun. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Ask the loa what is wrong, why your life is like this,” Layte said. “I am sorry, there are three people we have to ask the loa about tonight, and there is the usual Friday night, we must get ready now.”

  Mayla didn’t know if she should go into the other room or not, but people started coming in and standing next to the walls. Paul pulled her back, so she was standing against the wall, too. All of the wall space was taken up, and Layte came back in. Behind her, people crowded in the door. Three men came in with drums and three-legged stool
s and sat down on the side.

  Layte nodded at her. She felt awkward, and the jug was heavy, but she picked it up and carefully offered it in each of the four cardinal directions. Then she handed it back to Layte and went back to stand by Tim. Another woman came up and took the jug, offered it in four directions, and handed it back to Layte. Finally a boy, about sixteen, took the jug in shaking hands, and offered it to the four corners, his movements jerky with nervousness, his dark face shiny with sweat. Layte went to the door and poured a little water on the floor: once, twice, again. Then she poured a fine stream of water from the door to the sobagui. Then she wet at right angles to the first line of water and poured another thin trickle from the walls to the sobagui. Mayla expected her to go to the back wall, but she didn’t.

  Layte knelt down and reached inside a cotton drawstring bag tied around her waist. She pulled out a handful of white powder, like chalk or flour and traced lines on the dark red floor.

  Tim whispered, “What are they doing?”

  “They’re drawing veve, like the ones on the walls, spirit gates. That’s how the loa come, through the veve.”

  People around her started singing, “Fait un vever pour moin.” Mayla expected the drums to start, but they didn’t. The singing was full of rough bits and untrained voices, women singing in little girl voices. Did anybody sing much anymore, except when no one was listening? Or in church?

  Layte drew carefully. Everybody watched. Some people sang but a lot of people looked around, not really paying much attention.

  There was a bit of commotion at the door, and then three people backed in, two men and a woman. One of the men and the woman carried flags made heavy with spangles of white and silver buttons. They were white or silver on white but they made swirling patterns like waves and lines and spirals. The other man carried a saber. Except for the fact that they were walking backwards they looked almost like a flag corps. The room was so small and there were already so many people in it that the flag brushed Mayla as they backed past and Mayla could see the sweat mark under the arm of the woman’s dress. They came slowly and deliberately around the room, sweeping to end up with a flourish right in front of the altar, just at the time Layte stood up. Layte said something in Creole, a strong statement, and the people answered back. She said something else and the people answered back. It took Mayla a minute, but then it became so familiar that she felt goose-bumps on her arms. She couldn’t understand the Creole but the response sounded like church.