Plus One (3 page)

“This isn’t a jail, Miss … Miss…” He looked at the name on my cell phone but gave up. “It’s a detention center. Curfew violation via self-inflicted injury is a class B nonviolent offense—a misdemeanor if it’s your first time.”

“I want a lawyer,” I said.

“Nope. It’s a summary crime. The magistrate rules without a trial.”

“Please, can’t I have my phone? My grandfather doesn’t know where I am. He’ll be worried sick. He
is
sick…”

“The young man in the hospital told me.” He looked at my cell again. Seeing it in his hand, through that bulletproof barrier, I realized that I felt naked without it—stripped of my identity and my connection to my grandfather, whose Braille phone was my lifeline to him while I was at school and work.

“It’s ‘Poppu’ in your address book, right?” the Guard said. I wanted to slap his smirking mouth. “We’ve sent him a message. If you’re innocent, he’ll be texted to pick you up after your hearing.”

“He can’t pick me up. I told you, he’s
sick
.” I didn’t bother to mention that he was blind, too. I slammed the handset down and slumped to a sitting position against the clear wall.

I had neglected to ask what would happen if the magistrate found me guilty.

I folded my arms on my knees and put my head down. The anesthetic block had worn off in my finger, and it was throbbing and hot again. I was bleeding right through the bandage—a bright, wet crimson that would have freaked me out if I hadn’t had bigger worries. If I weren’t so damned tired.

I closed my eyes, and I thought about that nosy apprentice in the ER.
What did you do to get assigned to labor?

I’ll tell you what I did, Day Boy: I was a screwup in school, that’s what. I was a lazy, rebellious nothing of a student, and so I was assigned a drudge factory apprenticeship with all the poor slobs who
couldn’t
do better. No one on this earth who pulled administrative strings—not the Night Ministry or the Day government—expected anything of me, or had any hope for my future. And once you’re on the loser track in this country, it’s impossible to get off. Only kids like D’Arcy Benoît, who had the genetic luck of being born a Ray, not to mention the personality trait of being an ass kisser, advanced to a professional career and a successful life.

Ciel was the one with the brains between the two of us, and I guess it paid off for him. When they hauled him off that night, he didn’t end up going to jail, he got reassigned to Day. That’s how brilliant he was.

Rotten Ciel. He knew Poppu was dying, but that didn’t mean he’d skirt the law and try to visit us, or send us an uncensored text. He hadn’t even visited us when he could have, legally, on Unity Night. The next Unity Night was two months away, by which time Poppu would be … I couldn’t stand to think of it. Ciel used to be a troublemaker in school like me, too—you can’t be Poppu’s grandchild and not have a little fire in you—but when he became a Ray he also became a team player.

Ciel had always been a whiz with computers and wireless technology. He started tinkering practically when he started walking. His specialty became routing intact text messages around the censorship firewalls for all his buddies and their families—which was probably the reason he got chosen for reassignment after he was arrested. Only the most talented Smudges got to become Rays, and until Ciel I had never heard of anyone being selected from jail. But when you accepted the transfer—and everyone who had the chance grabbed it—you left the night, and your family, behind. Ciel was a Ray now, legally, and married to a Ray I’d never met, and all of his skills were being used to thwart and arrest the hacks getting around the censors. The very hacks he’d left behind who used to be his friends.

Until Ciel was arrested and Poppu got esophageal cancer, I didn’t give a flying crap that I would never be anything in this world. It was enough to put my hours in at school without studying, and to clock in at the factory with as much attitude as possible while still not losing my job, to laugh around the dinner table with my family, to read with Poppu, and finally take my CircaDiem in the morning, to sleep my exhaustion away. Or try to sleep: no matter what the president and the Night Minister said in their speeches, even blackout shades and earplugs made REM in the middle of the day hit-or-miss.

The thing is, when you’re with someone like Poppu—someone who sees straight through your battered façade and loves every bit of you, someone who makes you laugh until you pee your pants, someone who grabs you in a hug exactly when you need it—you don’t crave any kind of approval from strangers. You don’t need to “matter” in the world, because you already matter to the only person who counts.

There was a faint tap on the wall behind me. I turned around to see D’Arcy Benoît. He raised his hand and uncurled his fingers in a wimpy “hello.”

Wednesday
11:00 a.m.

I stood up slowly. I was as tall as him, which I hadn’t noticed in the hospital. He hadn’t noticed it either, I could tell. Without his lab coat on, wearing a teal T-shirt and dark jeans, he looked like any other self-satisfied Ray I might want to push into a puddle.

He picked up the black phone next to him and put it to his ear. I didn’t do the same. I glared at him, cocked my head, turned my back on him, and sat down, curled up again, hugging my knees.

There was another tap on the wall. I didn’t move.
I have nothing to say to you.

Rap-rap-rap.
More insistent this time, authoritative. I turned around, fire igniting in my chest.

But it was the Guard. He was holding the phone to his ear. Day Boy was next to him. No, more like behind him. He was a sniveling coward, that one. I stood up and put the receiver to my ear, but barely.

“This isn’t like an ex-boyfriend you can blow off,” the Guard said. I scowled at the mental image of Day Boy as any kind of a boyfriend, even an ex. “We don’t allow visitors in the detention center. He’s here for a medical consult only.”

I glanced at my mess of a bandaged finger. It was dramatic-looking, I granted that.

“Fine,” I grumbled. “But I’ll die of hunger before this kills me. Do you have anything out there I can eat?”

“You think you’re in a hotel?” He held the receiver out for Day Boy, and I heard the muffled instruction, “If you need a physical exam I’ll have to fill out a requisition to let you enter.” The Guard disappeared through a side door.

Day Boy and I were quiet for a second, the captor looking at the animal in the zoo. I intended to give him the silent treatment, but I had always been more of a wear-your-feelings-on-your-sleeve type.

“You
moron
, I can’t believe you threw me in jail! How can you live with yourself, knowing you’re an arrogant ass who’s really just a chickenshit inside? Is it not enough for you that you have
everything
while I have—”

“Can you please show me your finger?” he interrupted.

I jabbed my bloody right middle finger in his face through the glass.
Up yours.

His irritation gave way seamlessly to a flash of worry. “I’ll need you to remove the bandage for me.”

I lifted my shoulder to hold the receiver against my cheek as I began removing the tape.

“I didn’t actually come to see your finger,” he said quietly. “But now that I’m here it looks like it might need attention.”

“What are you talking about,” I grumbled.

“I don’t blame you for being angry. Well, I suppose I do if you’re actually guilty. But has it occurred to you there’s a reason I turned you in?”

“Because you’re sycophant Day scum?” Most of the medical tape was off, but the blood on the bandage had clotted, and I couldn’t peel off the last bit without pulling at the gauze pad and hurting myself. I talked a big game, but I’d always been one of those kids who had to take Band-Aids off a millimeter at a time, with lots of rests and deep breathing to steel my courage.

“Like
that
, for instance,” he said, proving some sort of mysterious point. I stared at him.

“Like
what
.”

“‘
Sycophant’?
What laborer uses that word? I couldn’t figure out what you were up to, but all the red flags were flying at the hospital.”

I was really starting to get concerned that I couldn’t take the bandage off, so I put another effort into unwrapping it, pitifully peeling at the outer layer of the gauze pad, getting blood all over my good hand, but nowhere near exposing the wound.

“Listen,” he said, as if he were running out of time. I didn’t look up. He went on anyway. “I was in a lousy position. It’s against the law for me not to report suspicious injuries—not to report curfew violations. And your phone records didn’t help lower the flags. It was a factory station you’ve manned uneventfully for three years; you took a Modafinil, so you should have been alert; the accident happened at the end of your shift, with enough time to get to the ER before sunrise. Not to mention when I gave you the waiver to sign, you took the pen with your left hand.”

“What the heck does that prove?” I couldn’t ignore his babbling anymore. “Plenty of people are left-handed!”

“Only ten percent of the population. It just seemed too—too convenient that you injured your nondominant hand in such a mild way, but seriously enough to get you into the ER.”

“Did you set me up with that form from the nurse?” He was nastier than I thought.

“Not entirely, no, I—”

I held up my half-undressed finger. “My ‘mild’ injury hurts too much for me to unwrap it. You’ll have to come in here, where I can kick your ass.”

He looked at the ceiling and huffed, like he’d had enough. He peered at the instructions next to the black phone and then punched two buttons that switched him to another line, killing the connection with me. He said something terse into the handset, hung it up, and waited for the Guard to come get him. He left without looking at me.

I was sure that I’d scared him off for good, but several minutes later the door to my cell was opening. The Guard and Day Boy stepped inside.

Homeless Guy

After Ciel was arrested he was in jail for two months, and we were not allowed to visit him. The judge refused to set bail—said he was a flight risk. I didn’t know how a person could flee for long with the random curfew checks that happened all over the city. You could be shopping at the market or sitting in a movie and an Hour Guard would come up to you and politely ask to see your ID. That is, he was polite unless you refused, in which case he was empowered to arrest you, or disable you if you fled. Of course, when an Hour Guard fired blindly at someone’s back with a gun, “disable” sometimes turned to “kill.” Whenever an Hour Guard asked, you were required to hand over your phone, and he could look at your ID—and whatever else he damn well felt like looking at while he was in there—and most people I knew said “Thank you” after the experience.

A random check happened to me at least once every couple of weeks. I could only imagine how frequent it would be if I lived in the Day. I’d heard there were ten times the number of Hour Guards employed by the Day Ministry. Rays had more reason to be vigilant: no Day person in his right mind would want to switch to the Night, but plenty of Smudges had tried to forge their profiles and sneak into the Day. The only people I ever heard of who got caught out of place after dusk were Ray teenagers who were drunk at their buddies’ parties and stumbled into the darkness instead of hunkering down until morning. They usually spent the night in jail and were released with a couple of hours of community service and not a blemish on their records.
Their
curfew violations were considered youthful hijinks, not felonies.

Before his trial, Ciel told me he knew a few people who had jumped bail and disappeared. They were neither Night nor Day now, as far as he could tell, or so good at traveling between the two that they never got caught. It was a mystery to him and to me.

In the weeks after they dragged Ciel off, the raging heartburn that Poppu had after every meal turned into nausea, and the nausea turned into vomiting blood, and he could no longer swallow without food becoming impacted in his chest, which was terrifying for him and for me. He lost fifteen kilos before my eyes and looked like skin hanging on bones. Even his hair began to thin. It took us a month to get an appointment with the state-insurance Night doctor, and he was admitted to the hospital on the spot because—as I’d been trying to say to anyone who might listen—something was horribly wrong.

Poppu’s surgery happened while Ciel was in jail, awaiting trial. They took out most of his esophagus, rebuilt it with some of his colon, and stuck a temporary feeding tube into his jejunum until he recovered enough to eat soft foods by mouth. The surgery was seven hours long, and Poppu needed two blood transfusions. I skipped school for a month, nursing him first at the hospital and then at home, and going to Ciel’s court dates alone. You could have pushed me over by blowing on me. I cried every morning when I crawled into bed. The apartment was so empty I could hear the mice scritching in the walls as they settled down with me to sleep.

It was supposed to be a trial by jury, and the lawyers prepared for it right up until the last minute as if it would be. The night after they finished choosing the jurors and the alternates, I was sitting in the gallery one row behind the spot where I knew Ciel would be. There were only a few other people in the audience, and two of them looked homeless—a filthy, young, wiry black guy with wild, roving eyes, and a lanky old man who was hugging a plastic bag in his arms—like they were just in it for the heat and free coffee. A petite Asian woman with a notepad stayed as far away from them as possible and may have been a news reporter.

Ciel walked in ahead of the bailiff—walked with baby steps because his ankles were restrained—wearing the clothes he had been arrested in. There were plastic ligatures acting as handcuffs on his wrists, linked to another ligature around his waist. He looked suddenly very different to me. He was too slim, and his skin color was ashen. His hair had grown in to a pretty red fuzz, and he seemed both younger than eighteen and wizened at the same time. He had a splotch of purple-blue on his cheek, and his eyes were swollen and pink, as if from crying. Confusion blended with panic and anger in a hot slurry in my chest, and I had to clench my fists to keep from standing up and screaming at everyone in the room,
Why aren’t you taking care of him?
The two people I loved most in the world were disappearing in front of me. Without them I would become a walking corpse.