1.
My friend Katie left Brisbane a decade ago, no longer content to live in the darkness. She applied for a green card and paid the bribes, moved to Pennsylvania where the sun still rises in the East and disappears behind the Western horizon. Her emails wax rhapsodic about the uneven, unpredictable rhythm of it all. “It’s glorious, Mika,” she says. “I’d forgotten how warm sunlight is. There’s people with suntans, and they grow crops in fields.”
After she moved, Katie found work in a distilling operation, one of the smaller companies. Sometimes she sends me gifts she’s nicked from their supply: bottles of distilled sunlight, transmuted into a heady golden liquid and sealed with cork and wax. Smuggled past the sniffer dogs and customs agents, delivered to my flat by the ne’er-do-well friend of a ne’er-do-well friend. The dark glass warm and pure and pleasant to touch, engendering smiles as they’re cradled in your arms.
Her latest delivery arrived in the false bottom of a plastic crate, hidden beneath a layer of dashboard dolls with hula skirts, hibiscus flowers, and a sucker where their feet should be. I hide the product in my safe, put a hula girl above my dash. Her hips do a shimmy when I fire up the engine, keep shaking as I pull out into the empty street. I drive down to the Seven-Eleven and treat myself to a Coke, for I am now in possession of five hundred milliliters of liquid daylight.
I get to work, a spring in my step. It will be a good week. A good month, if I am smart.
2.
There has been no daylight in Brisbane for five years, a hundred and twenty-three days, fifteen hours, and thirty-six minutes. The first months were hard, all of us confused and alone in the dark. The confusion didn’t last. We picked up and got on with life. Trusted in the government to throw resources at the problem, figured out ways to make do while they tested solutions.
The news remained bleak despite all that. Some parts of the world went dark and stayed dark. Some remained touched by daylight. Science provided no way of explaining the situation, which meant there was no discernable means of fixing it. Distillation proved the only means of bringing the sunshine in from the few, scant regions where the sun yet shone.
We adapted to our situation, once it became clear no solutions were forthcoming. These days Brisbane’s streetlights switch on at 8:00 AM, an artificial daybreak we take for granted. They turn off twelve hours later, nightfall, another demarcation we maintain out of habit. Hydroponic grow houses ensure we’re all fed, albeit with limited fare. UV lamps and vitamin D shots ensure that our biology continues to function. They tag all daylight brought in through regular channels; the supply monitored and regulated to verify we use wisely it.
My ritual, with my illicit delivery, has been honed over several years. I start my rounds near lights on, when the yearning for daybreak is strongest. The filthy rich have already fled the city, heading for brighter places, but there are still plenty of those with money and no desire to leave. I deal to the eccentric, the well compensated, and the extremely well off and idle. Men and women in fake tans, wearing linen and gold jewelery. Or quiet, observant people who long for the days when open-air gardens existed without a spiderweb of lamps clustered overhead.
I move through the check-points, alert my regulars there’s product available through the use of codes and ciphers. Start the bidding, let it build. Ten bucks a millimeter. Twelve. Thirteen. We’re coming up on fifteen dollars a mil before Midday arrives, and it’ll be higher still by the time the day’s done.
I receive a call from my sister, Pavio. I do not answer, for I am hustling, and she does not leave a message for fear I will get caught.
Pavio’s always feared the consequences of what might happen, if I’m busted, and I cannot say she’s incorrect to harbor those concerns.
3.
At six, I head to West End and drop in to see Lillian. She runs a café off Boundary Road, just through a peeling doorway set in the red brick wall. Years ago, before the darkness began, they sold the finest latte I’d ever tasted. Now authentic coffee costs sixty bucks a shot, and most of us show up there because Lillian makes good tofu scramble and does her best with chicory flavored drink we’re happy to accept as a coffee substitute. I prefer Lillian’s fake imitation because she doesn’t pretend. It’s listed on her blackboard as Hot Nostalgia, the chicory cultivated in her own private grow-house three blocks over, supplemented by a smaller crop of arabica trees.
I don’t conduct business in Lillian’s café because her uncle works for the police. He commands check-points and riot squads, the jackboots designed to keep order, and for all that Lillian is not her uncle the connection bothers me. The sole time I broke this rule, back when I first started dealing, it was a harbinger for a close call with the authorities. They raided my apartment, cops and military personnel rummaging through my possessions.
Only luck saved me from being arrested—I’d sold the last of my product earlier that morning. Had they come four hours prior, I would have been a dead man walking.
Lillian and I didn’t speak for three weeks after the raid went down. When I came back, I played it safe: kept our conversation general, steered clear of questions she might have about my business.
Still, I like to see her. I couldn’t stay away. Lillian scrambles tofu as I claim a seat, and pours me a Hot Nostalgia. Serves it with the vague contempt baristas hold for drinks that are not truly coffee. Her eyes are very large, very gray. The light seems to dance in them when my glance meets hers. Lillian smiles, and I smile with her, even after all these years.
She says, “Pavio stopped by earlier, wanted to track you down.”
I dig my fork into the scramble. I know what Pavio wants from me, but I do not discuss business with Lillian. Caution is my watchword now, for all that I think of her as a friend.
“I told her you’ve been dropping by around dinner,” Lillian says.
When I do not answer that either, she changes the topic to a mutual acquaintance whose applied to immigrate, like Katie, to the lights of Pennsylvania. Lillian tells it as if this were news. As if everyone didn’t apply for a green card these days, looking to get away from the streetlights and the loneliness that comes from spending your life in darkness.
4.
I finish eating and contemplate a cup of actual, honest-to-God coffee. Tell myself I can afford it, once the daylight sells. Lillian sees me hesitate, knows what it means. We edge as close as we will get to an admission that I’m dealing: “Good week?” she says.
“Not yet, but it’s coming.”
I’m staring at the menu board and Lillian smiles.
“You can owe me,” she says. “Fix me up later, yeah?”
I agree in a moment of weakness. My simple, cardinal rule: it is smarter to work in cash than trade in endless credit, better to owe people nothing instead of fretting about the debt. I break that guideline on rare occasions, but the aroma of real coffee, dark and bitter, wipes out my practical side.
I sit by the counter, take my time. Sip with slow, deliberate languor, savoring the flavor. Lillian cleans her ancient machine, dumping grounds from the portafilter with a look of resignation. It’s hot in the cramped quarters, amid the tight press of tables and the close-set walls. She wipes perspiration from her forehead, grabs my dinner plate, and transfers it to the tiny kitchen out back.
I wish it wasn’t like this, but it is. She is who she is, and I am myself. There’s no space for compromise in our night-shrouded world.
5.
Pavio shows at 7:05, just less than an hour until the streetlights go out. She still dresses in dark jeans and sweaters, a hold-out against the recent trend towards vibrant colors and reflective stripes. She wears glasses with thick, black frames. Clips her hair, exposing the sharp angles of her skull. Lillian doesn’t charge her when Pavio orders a cup of faux-coffee, and Pavio stops to breathe in the hickory scent as though she actually savors it. She waits for Lillian to head into the kitchen before she bothers to speak.
“How much have you got?” she says, no preamble. Pavio has a very low tolerance for bullshit.
“Five hundred mils,” I tell her. “Give or a take. I haven’t measured yet.”
Pavio nods and sips. “I need eight minutes‘ worth. No payment up front. No questions asked.”
I don’t ask questions, because I don’t want to know. When Pavio explains her projects to me, her intent disappears behind the melange of terminology. She’s smarter than me. Well-read. Spent years at the local university, accumulating degrees and building interests. Expects other people to keep up with her brain, gets disappointed when we fail.
I do not want to disappoint her. We both know I will hand over the product, nearly two-thirds of my flask. Had it been anyone else, I would have laughed at the suggestion. Mentioned the rising prices as the auctions picked up speed. Shown them the messages on my phone offering sixty bucks a millimeter.
For Pavio, I close my eyes and try to do the math. Calculate the profit remaining once it supplies my sister, how much I’ll regret the excess of the last few hours. I agree, as we both assume I will.
Pavio gives me a time and location. She finishes her drink and leaves.
Lillian re-emerges and shakes her head. “You shouldn’t encourage her,” she says. “You know how it will go down, yeah?”
I do, but I admit nothing. It’s safer for us both.
“She’s going to get in trouble,” Lillian says. “They’re watching out for people trying things outside the military labs.”
I check my watch. “Twelve minutes to eight. Almost time for lights out.”
Lillian frowns. I’ve hurt her feelings. “Mika,” she says. “Come on, man. I—”
“Catch you tomorrow, yeah?”
I bail on our nascent argument, for all the good that does. We are all in trouble, now, every single one of us. We accept the endless darkness as normal, adapt as best we can, forget it could be any other way.
We accept, and in accepting, give in and subsist.
Pavio, at least, still believes in doing something. I respect that, as much as I’m able, while eking out a living.
6.
At Midnight, I check my phone. Run through the final bids. The contents of the flask will sell, on average, for one hundred and thirteen dollars a millimeter, portioned out between nine different buyers, a few seconds of daylight here. A whole minute to someone there.
Enough to keep me solvent, though it could have done far more.
7.
Wednesday morning. Eleven o’clock. The location Pavio gave me is three hundred kilometers down the coast, away from the streetlights that demark day and night. Stars fill the sky like the coarse grains on a sandpaper, as if the light is still out there beyond the darkness, trying to scour its way through.
Pavio has built a machine, a complex tangle of tubes and wiring connected to a generator. She’s towed it out to this beach on a trailer, covered with a blue tarpaulin. When I show up, the warm bottle of daylight tucked into my satchel, hidden beneath dirty laundry in case I am stopped and searched, she is kneeling with a laptop perched on the towbar. Her computer connected to her apparatus, the screen bright in the darkness. I park my car and kill the engine, wait for the hula girl on my dash to go still. She seems less amusing now, here on a darkened beachside. Far from home, but so close to the ink-dark sea and the pale expanse of sand.
There’s no pause in Pavio’s work. No glance up to confirm it’s me whose arrived. Pavio stays focused and waves me over with one hand, the other dancing across the keyboard. I slip her daylight from my bag.
“I’m still setting up,” she says. “Diagnostic check.”
I approach, studying her device with caution. Her projects are usually small, discrete. The size of a breadbox, or a chest of drawers, when she feels ambitious. Her machine is larger than my car, twice as tall as I am. Where did she source the materials? Where did she find the space?
“Trip down was bumpier than expected,” she says. “Don’t want to screw the first test up because a part rattled loose.”
There are chimneys, six of them, the chassis built around their upright metal flues like the swollen roots of a tree. When I ask Pavio what needs doing, she points to the cap atop a bulbous tank. “Pour,” she says. “Gently. Try not to spill it.”
The bottle warms my chest and my steps are unsteady on the sand. I tip the daylight into the engine, thick as golden syrup. Daylight doesn’t have a smell, but as it hits, the air long-forgotten scents unfurl: the heating steel of Pavio’s machine; the smell of sun-warmed sand rising up, courtesy of the momentary exposure as the light funnels into the tank. Old memories resurrected by the moment of distilled warmth.
When I’m done, the bottle empty and cold, Pavio nods in satisfaction.
“All right,” she said. “We’re ready to go.”
She produces a mask, thick steel with a black lens. The protection welders use, sitting close to the bright, molten solder. Pavio unearths a second, hands it to me.
“You might want to sit,” she says.
8.
I have seen sixteen machines in operation before my sister’s latest creation. They were frequently small devices, prototypes, reactors, and generators constructed to test a particular theory. This machine is no prototype. It is, perhaps, a culmination. As I slump to the sand it rumbles, metal ticking as it expands, responding to the warmth of the daylight running through its systems. It builds to a calamitous racket, like an engine pushed too hard, too fast. I tense, prepare to scramble, get the hell away before it blows, but Pavio touches my arm and holds me in place. She speaks, I think, behind her mask, but I do not hear it over the noise.
What emerges from those open flues is not the daylight of my youth, familiar and warm and unthinkingly there in a way we never noticed. What emerges is a torrent, six exploding geysers, expelled with sufficient force to lance the sky itself. A flare so bright I look away, one arm thrown against the tinted lens of my mask, spots dancing in front of my eyes. The rush of it sends grains of sand flying, stinging the exposed flesh on my hands, my neck, my ears.
Through the haze I can see it: the beach as it used to be. Lit up. Warm. Inviting. Hot dunes and blue waves and white shells and driftwood. The warmth that seeks a way in through your very pores, leaving your skin humming with the pleasure of being out there. I’m risking sunburn, actual sunburn, for the first time in years.
I do not hear the gunshots over the din of the machine. Do not know they have destroyed it until the light dims and the uniforms appear, swarming the beach with determined precision. The darkness reasserts itself, swarms in to fill the emptiness left behind as the sunlight fades.
There are sirens. There are guns. We are, quite thoroughly, busted. They cuff Pavio and take her away. This may, or may not, be an act of kindness. She’s not forced to watch as three soldiers with machine guns annihilate her beloved, painstaking creation and ensure its destruction.
9.
They do not arrest me, though it’s made clear that arrest is an option they’re choosing not to pursue. The detectives who question me take the time to establish their benevolence. They will not arrest me, so long as I cooperate. So long as I answer questions, tell them what my sister’s machine is meant to do and why I was there on the beach. I give them the truth, so far as I understand it, because I know so very little. I expect my lack of knowledge to anger them, but they release me after several hours and warn me to keep my nose clean.
They are still holding Pavio. Interrogations, they tell me. Further inquiries needed. When Katie ships me a flask of daylight, it’s intercepted at the border. Her next attempt, and her last, sees her details given to the authorities and time spent in a Pennsylvania jail.
They will not let me see Pavio anymore. They authorities have laid no charges.
“She is doing necessary work,” the officer managing Pavio’s case informs me. “And she’s cooperating. She’s a smart cookie, best thing she could do right now.”
“Cooperating with what?” I ask.
“Our investigation,” the officer says, as if that answers anything.
10.
Days turn into weeks. They do not charge her, nor release her. They do not let me speak to her, nor let her make a phone call.
We gave up these civilized rules, once the darkness fell over the city. Regarded it as necessary, given how poorly we saw things amid the inky shadows of constant night.
In desperation, I ask for Lilian’s help. “Talk to your uncle,” I beg her. “Get me something.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she says, and shortly I receive a letter with Pavio’s name at the end.
It arrives in my PO Box, the envelope taped shut after the military reviewed it, going through the contents to censor what is necessary with a kind of ruthless efficiently. Whole paragraphs expunged, wiped out by impenetrable black ink. Those that remain are banal, emotionless.
They promise she is okay, that her capture may be a good thing.
11.
Weeks later, I head to Lillian’s café again. She’s killing time, wiping the tables down now the dinner rush is over. Asks me if there’s any news, as I settle in to peruse her menu.
“Pavio wrote me a letter,” I tell her. “Heavily censored, from the looks of it, but she might be doing okay.”
“A girl that smart…” Lillian says, and stops herself. She’s been saying it a lot, as a source of comfort, ever since I asked for her help. A girl that smart, like Pavio, you don’t want to see her talents go to waste. A girl that smart, like Pavio, you find a productive use for her capabilities. Lillian uses those four words so often, I wonder if they’re truly hers, or something repeated after talking to her uncle.
She scrambles tofu and places it before me. “A girl that smart,” I tell her, “deserves more than a world like this delivers.”
“Pity she’s stuck with this one, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say. “A pity.”
At night the question plagues me: a girl that smart, like Pavio, you ever wonder what she was trying to do, with that big ol’ machine? It prompts uncomfortable follow-up queries: What set the authorities on their trail? What, exactly, started the authorities searching, timed their arrival just in time to see Pavio’s work up and running? A girl that smart, like Pavio, sixteen machines into her process and experienced in avoiding detection. Who did she trust that betrayed her to the authorities? What mistake drew their attention, at her moment of triumph?
I don’t want to contemplate what this could imply, given the limited number of friendships my sister maintained on a day-to-day basis.
There is only one name that makes sense, but I don’t want to admit the possibility.
12.
I take other jobs to keep my ends meeting. I drive a cab, then walk dogs, then end up working on the line of the local grocery. Scanning, bagging, taking payment. Cheerfully saying hello and goodbye, every time a customer comes through my station. Personal interaction is a competitive edge these days, a reprieve from the isolation engendered by too much darkness.
It isn’t that I hate the job. One finds work where one can and musters the gratitude one can. I keep applying to the authorities for news of my sister, receive identical responses in return. Pavio’s being held. Pavio’s being questioned. She’s helping with their enquiries, further details will be provided.
For weeks, I avoid Lillian’s café. I cannot bring myself to face her, cannot leverage the doubts from my head and pretend it is like it was. When I break, uncertain, angry at myself, she seems very pleased to see me. She points to a chair at the counter, brews me fresh coffee and readies a plate of scramble. Waits for the room to clear before she comes over and makes small talk.
In the end, just before lights out, she says, “You gotta stop pushing for answers.”
I blink at her, surprised.
“They’re not going to let her go,” she says. “They need her. She’s too smart to be working rogue, dealing with the problem solo. They want her supervised, controlled. Resourced and networked with others like her, trying to find a solution.”
For a second, I have no voice for questions. Lillian stands behind her counter, rubbing her hands with a coffee-stained rag. She lets me recover, process the news. “You asked again?”
“I asked,” she says.
“And you believe your uncle? She’s really okay?”
“Sometimes you’ve got to trust,” she says. “If you push, they’ll have to stop you. Send in a squad to make you disappear.”
I am not okay with that idea. I do not want to disappear. But I do not want to drop it, stop pushing without confirmation that my sister’s safe and happy.
“You knew it wouldn’t last. Eventually, they’d catch up with her.” Lillian reaches across the counter, puts her hand on top of mine. Her touch is soft and warm, gritty where the coffee-ground clings to her skin. “She’s okay. I swear it. She’s content.”
It’s so tempting to believe, to let the worry go. I look into Lillian’s marvelous eyes, gray and bright and happy to see me. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I no longer deal in daylight. I have an honest job and I earn honest money, and the old impediments that held us to friendship have ceased to be meaningful. All that remains to keep us apart are suspicions.
Then Lillian says: “Tell me about the light, when Pavio got that machine up and running. How’d it feel to see blue sky again? To see daylight in the sky?”
I look away and take a deep breath, ashamed of my own thoughts. Part of me still wants to hurt her, but the truth sticks in my throat.
“It wasn’t blue,” I tell her. “Not really. Not ever. Pavio explained it once, all wavelengths and angles. The blue comes from colors scattering differently when you shine up instead of on.”
Then I pull my hand from hers, the warmth of her touch still lingering. I sit back and meet Lilian’s stare, rub my palm against my jeans as I wonder how far to trust her.
“I could use another coffee,” I say. “Before you’re done for the night.”
“I can only swing you a single freebie,” she says. “The next one gets paid in cash.”
I do not have that kind of money, but I order the coffee, anyway.