Half the Day Is Night by Maureen F. McHugh

look at.
    At the sub port he had to open the plastic bag and find the tickets in the wreckage of his suit. Her eyes started watering. The tickets were red and stank. “I’ll take them,” she said.
    He waited while she explained to the ticket clerk what had happened, and the clerk ended up punching her another set and throwing out the ones she had.
    She came back and sat down beside David. “Are you all right?” she asked.
    He nodded. Then he sighed. “It was a mistake,” he said.
    She asked him what he meant, but he just shook his head and wouldn’t explain any further.

3
    Probation
    On Saturday David drove Mayla to see her grandfather.
    â€œI am thinking,” he said in the car, “I am not the person to do this job for you.”
    â€œI think you’re doing fine,” she said. “I expected it all to take some time to settle in.”
    He thought of the telltale going off. The burn, the shock. For a moment he had felt the dye and thought it was the moment before one knows one is injured, when there is only the shock and the feeling of something wet. “No,” he said. “I think it is not a good idea.”
    She did not say anything and he stole a glance at her. She was looking out at the road. “I’m sorry about the business in Marincite,” she said. “That was my fault.”
    Yes, he thought, it was. “That is not it,” he said anyway, “I think I am just not the right person.”
    â€œIs it Tim?” she asked. “He’ll be leaving.”
    He shook his head.
    â€œYou haven’t even been here thirty days,” she said. He put the car on automatic and they accelerated smoothly onto the beltway. “Try it another sixty days,” she said. “It’ll get better.”
    â€œI do not think so,” he said.
    â€œI can understand your feelings,” she said. “Tim is being a prick. And what happened in Marincite, that would shake up anybody.”
    He shrugged. It would not get better, but sixty days wouldn’t really make a difference. “All right,” he said.
    â€œThank you,” she said.
    She directed him off the beltway and they dropped down to the second level of the city, then onto residential streets.
    The street was a great deal like the street Mayla lived on. Just featureless garage doors, no sense of the residences behind the concrete. She had him stop, and she got out and palmed the sensor next to the garage door. For a moment he thought it wasn’t going to open, and then the door lifted.
    He expected a garage like Mayla’s with space for a couple of cars but this space would have easily held twenty. A public garage, like at the bank. He had not thought much about where her grandfather would live in the city. He guessed he had imagined a place like Mayla’s, not this huge residence for many people.
    There were only two cars: a long car like Mayla’s boss rode to work and a sedan. “Park next to the Benare,” she said and pointed to the sedan. Her voice echoed off the concrete. Why were there only two cars in the parking? It wasn’t a workday.
    At the back of the garage were wrought-iron doors on a lift. The iron was worked into figures, tall birds like cranes and palm trees and flowers. Like an ornate bird cage.
    They went below the floor of the garage into a lobby. Concrete walls painted white, black and white tiles on the floor. Dusty Greek busts on pedestals like garden statuary. The space felt cold and disused, even colder than the usual lobby. This whole country seemed built of concrete.
    She folded the lift door back and the iron crashed. He followed her across the black and white tiles into a carpeted hallway. The doors were big heavy wood, and set into each one like a porthole was a Chinese blue and white plate, blue willow plates depicting a girl and her lover fleeing her father the angry mandarin. Some of the doors were open. An office that