Sunshine

I shook my head. Experimenting with motion. I remembered the void, the alignment, the other senses—my little knife. My tree. My…doe. I wondered, when she had accepted the death she knew she could not escape, if she knew what her death was for, if that could have made any difference, if that was why she…I touched the knife-bulge in my pocket. It felt no different than it ever had. We sat in daylight; if I took it out it would look like any other pocketknife. The second blade, which I rarely used, would be covered with pocket lint; the first blade, which I used all the time, would need sharpening. Folded up it was about the length of my middle finger, and a little wider and deeper; it was scraped and gouged by years in a series of pockets, sharing cramped quarters with things like loose change and car keys. And it glowed in the dark, even in the beyond-dark of the void. Glowed like a beacon that said, “Hold on. I’ve got you. Here.”

I felt—carefully—after my experience of nowhere, of beyond-dark. Had I brought anything back after all, anything I could use?

Yes. But I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t anything so straightforward as a direction.

“Not caffeine after that,” said Aimil, still on the floor. “Scotch.” She got up on all fours and reached to the little cabinet next to her sofa. “And don’t even ask me if you want to try again, because the answer is no.”

I looked at her when she gave me a small heavy glass with a finger’s width of dark amber liquid in it, about the color of the thin wooden plates set into the sides of my little knife. “We won’t try it again today,” I said. “But we have to try again.”

“No, we don’t,” she said. “Let SOF figure it out. It’s what they’re for.”

“If they could figure it out they wouldn’t be asking us.”

“The Wars are over,” she said.

“Not exactly,” I said, after a pause. “Didn’t Pat tell you—”

“Yes, he told me we’ll all be under the dark in a hundred years!” she said angrily. “I know!”

I slid down to join her on the floor. I felt like a collection of old creaking hinges. I leaned over and put an arm around her. “I don’t want to know either.”

After a moment she said, “There have been two more dry guys in Old Town this last week. Have you heard about them?”

“Yes.” It had been on the news a few days ago—great stuff to hear when you’re driving alone in the dark—and Charlie and Liz had been talking about it when I brought the first tray of cinnamon rolls out front. They had fallen silent. I pretended I hadn’t heard anything and toppled the first burning-hot roll onto a plate for Mrs. Bialosky. She patted my hand and said, “Don’t you worry, sweetie, it’s not your fault.” Because she was Mrs. Bialosky I almost believed her, but I made the mistake of looking up, into her face, when I smiled at her, and saw the expression in her eyes. Oh. I almost patted her hand back and told her it wasn’t her fault either, but it wouldn’t have done any good. I guess I wasn’t surprised to find out that Mrs. Bialosky wasn’t only about litter and rats and flower beds.

“I wouldn’t have joined SOF just because Pat can turn blue ” Aimil said. “Working in a proofglassed room gives me asthma. Even part-time. Or maybe it’s just all the guys in khaki.”

I went back to Charlie’s for the dinner shift, but Charlie took one look at me and said, “I’ll find someone to cover for you. Go home.”

“I’ll go when you find someone,” I said, and lasted two hours, by which time poor Paulie had agreed to give up the rest of his night off after being there all afternoon. Teach him to be glad to escape the four-thirty-in-the-morning shift. I was home by eight-thirty; it was just full dark. Charlie had sent me home with a bottle of champagne that had a glass and a half left in it: perfect. I stood on my balcony and drank it and looked into the darkness. The darkness danced.

I had had an idea. I didn’t like it much, but I had to try it. I went back indoors and unplugged my combox. It’s never quite dark under the sky, and I didn’t have curtains for the balcony windows. I tucked the box under my arm, ducked into my closet, and closed the door. This was real darkness. There wasn’t a lot of room in there, but I swept a few shoes aside and sat down. Turned the box on, listened to the resentful hum of the battery; it was an old box, and preferred to run off a wire. The screen came up and asked me if I wanted to enter the globenet. I sat there, staring at the glowing lettering. In the darkness, it didn’t flicker at all, it didn’t run away into millions of tiny skittish dwindling dimensions, like looking into a mirror with another one over your shoulder. I read it easily.

I liked it even less that my idea had worked. At least I didn’t have to use a combox at Charlie’s. It would have been difficult to explain why I needed a closet.