Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  Rhodes had been in the office since just after eight, early for him. At the end of yesterday’s workday his desk had still been littered with unfinished items, and both virtual extensions had been loaded as well; and, as usual, things had come pouring in all night long for his urgent attention in the morning. The weather had taken a turn for the worse too: sweltering heat, well beyond the norms even of modern times, and scary Diablo winds blasting down out of the east, bringing once again the threat, now practically a weekly event, of stirring up devastating fires along the bone-dry grassy ridges of Oakland and Berkeley. The winds were carrying with them, also, an oppressive shitload of toxic fumes out of the valley stagnation pool, potent enough to cut acne-like pockmarks into the facades of stone buildings.

  Aside from that, Rhodes had had a lousy night with Isabella the night before, and maybe three hours of sleep. It was an all-around wonderful morning. He was restless, irritable, swept by bursts of rage and confusion and occasionally something close to panic. For almost an hour now he had been spinning his wheels, accomplishing nothing.

  Time to get to work, finally.

  “Open, sesame,” Rhodes said stolidly, and Virtual One began to disgorge streaming ribbons of data into the air.

  He watched it all come spilling out, aghast. Reports, reports, reports. Quantitative stuff about enzyme absorption from the Portland lab; a long stupid screed from one of the sub-departments dealing with a foredoomed project to provide senior citizens with lung implants instead of genetic retrofits; a formidable batch of abstracts and preprints from Nature and Science that he would never have time in this present life to deal with; a horrendous pile of crap about some employee arbitration hassle involving third-floor janitorial androids overstepping their stipulated spheres of responsibility; the minutes of a meeting at the Sao Paulo office of a Samurai subsidiary he had never heard of, the work of which evidently impinged in some unspecified way on his department’s area of operations. And on and on and on and on.

  Rhodes felt like sobbing.

  Somehow his job had become all administration, very little actual doing of science any more. The science around here was done by kids like Van Vliet, while Rhodes coped with the inundation of reports, budget requests, strategic analyses, dead-end schemes like the lung-implant business, et cetera, et cetera, all the while attending an infinity of petrifyingly dull meetings and killing the occasional evening trying to fend off the troublesome curiosities of Israeli spies. For after-hours amusement he engaged in bewildering corrosive strife with the woman he supposedly loved. Somehow this was not the life he had intended for himself. Somehow he had veered off course, that was obvious.

  And the unthinkable heat today—the hard, malignant, abrasive air—the hot howling wind—

  Van Vliet—

  Isabelle—

  Isabelle—

  Isabelle—

  Wild unfocused sensations swept him like a sudden fever. Some kind of explosion seemed to be building up within him. He found that frightening. It was days like this, Rhodes thought, that led otherwise peaceable men to jump off bridges or commit random acts of murder. Diablo winds could do that to you. They were famous for that.

  My life is in need of fundamental change, he told himself. Fundamental change.

  What kind of change was in order, though? The work? The Isabelle relationship? Paul Carpenter had told him to break up with her and to take a job with some other mega-corp. There was a lot of sense in both those suggestions.

  But he simply wasn’t capable of the first, he thought, and the other was tempting but terrifying. Change jobs? Where would he go? How would he break free from Santachiara and Samurai? He was immobilized, tied hand and foot—to the Company, to Isabelle, to the adapto project, to the whole bloody mess.

  He put his head in his hands. He sat listening to the wind.

  Isabelle—

  Oh, Jesus. Isabelle.

  Last night, after dinner, at Isabelle’s place. Always trouble, when he stays there. He is sitting in the kitchen, by himself, sipping a Scotch. Isabelle has been very distant, cool, all evening, mysteriously so. Rhodes has never been able to understand what sends her into these periods of withdrawal, nor does she give him much help in figuring things out. Now she is busy in her little office off the living room with a memorandum she is dictating to herself about a consultation that day, one of her patients who is in deep shit.

  He makes a critical mistake when she comes back in for a glass of water: trying to break through her reserve, Rhodes asks her a question about the particular problem she’s dealing with, wants to know if there’s some kind of special complication.

  “Please, Nick.” Shoots him a basilisk glance. “Can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate?”

  “Sorry. I thought you were taking a break.”

  “I am. My mind isn’t.”

  “Sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t know.” Smiles. Shrugs goodheartedly. Tries to make it all nice again. It seems to him that he spends at least half his time with Isabelle just trying to make it all nice again, patching things up after some misunderstanding that is mostly beyond his comprehension.

  Instead of returning to the other room, she stands stiffly by the sink, hefting her water glass without drinking from it, as though measuring the specific gravity of its contents.

  Says, after a bit, doom-and-gloom voice, “Yes, there is a complication. I’m starting to think that the girl is genuinely suicidal.”

  So she wants to talk about it after all. Or else is just talking to herself out loud.

  “Who is?” Rhodes asks, gingerly.

  “Angela! Angela! Don’t you ever pay any attention?”

  “Oh,” he says. “Right. Angela.” He had thought the patient in question was a certain Emma Louise. Isabelle can be extremely nonlinear sometimes.

  He summons up what little he knows about Angela. Sixteen, seventeen years old, lives somewhere at the northern end of Berkeley, father a professor of history, or something, at the university. Under treatment by Isabelle for—what? Depression? Anxiety? No, Rhodes thinks: the girl has Greenhouse Syndrome. The new trendy thing. Total environmental paranoia. God knows why it should be setting in only now: it sounds very late-twentieth-century to him. But all the kids are getting it, it seems. A sense not just that the sky is an iron band around the planet, but that the actual walls are closing in, that the ceiling is descending, that asphyxiation is not very far away.

  “Suicidal? Really?” Rhodes says.

  “I’m afraid that she may be. She was wearing two face-lungs today, when she showed up for her session.”

  “Two?”

  “Convinced that one’s not enough. That the air is absolute poison, that if she takes a deep breath it’ll turn her lungs to mush. She wanted me to write a prescription for Screen for her, double the usual dose. I told her I’m not allowed to write any sort of prescriptions and she went into hysterics.”

  “Sounds like the opposite of suicidal,” Rhodes says mildly. “Hyperconcerned about protecting herself, yes, but why would that mean—”

  “You don’t get it. You never do, do you?”

  “Isabelle—”

  “She thinks that whatever precautions she takes will be entirely futile. She thinks she’s doomed, Nick. That we are on the threshold of the final apocalyptic environmental collapse, that she is living in the last generation of the human race, and that some hideous kind of gigantic eco-disaster is about to sweep down and destroy us all in the most awful possible way. She’s full of anger.”

  “She has a right to be, I suppose. Though I think she’s a hundred years ahead of the time. But still—suicide—”

  “The ultimate angry gesture. Spitting in the face of the world. Throwing her life away as a demonstration of protest.”

  “You really think she will?”

  “I don’t know. She very well might.” A new expression comes into Isabelle’s tense face: doubt, fear, uncertainty. Not her usual mode. She tugs unthinkingly at her hair, tangles
it into knots. Pacing around the room, now. “What worries me, basically, is that this may be getting beyond my zone of professional capability. I’m a therapist, not a psychiatrist. I wonder if I should pass her along.”

  She is debating entirely with herself. Rhodes is convinced of that now. But there is always the possibility that she may be expecting him to offer some indication that he’s listening.

  “Well, certainly if you think there’s any risk—”

  A softer voice. The therapist voice. “It would be a betrayal of trust, though. Angela and I have a covenant. I’m here to guide her. She has faith in me. I’m the only human being she does have faith in.” Then the tone hardens again. Instant switch: pure steel. Furious glare. Isabelle swings at the speed of light from mood to mood. “But why am I even talking to you about this? You couldn’t possibly understand the depth of her insecurities. Don’t you see, to send her for an outside consultation, to hand her off to some stranger at this delicate moment—”

  “But if you’re afraid that she’ll kill herself, though—”

  His mild words only heap more fuel on the fire. Isabelle is ablaze. “Look, Nick, this is for me to decide! There’s a transaction here that doesn’t involve you, that is utterly beyond your limited powers of comprehension, a complex personal transaction between this troubled girl and the one human being on Earth who genuinely cares for her, and you have no goddamned business sticking your uninformed opinion into—” She pauses, blinking like one who has suddenly awakened from a trance, drawing deep breaths, gulping the air in, as if even she has realized that she has gone a little too far around the bend with him.

  A moment’s silence. Rhodes waits.

  “This is all wrong,” she says.

  “What is?”

  “What we’re doing, you and I. We shouldn’t be getting into a fight over this,” Isabelle says, with a welcome softness coming into her voice.

  “No.” In vast relief. “Absolutely right. We shouldn’t be getting into fights over anything, Isabelle.”

  She seems genuinely to be trying to back off from her fury, her raging hostility. He can almost see the wheels shifting within her head.

  He waits to see what’s coming next.

  And then, without warning, what comes is a manic change of subject:

  “Let’s talk about something else, all right? Did you know that Jolanda has been dating that Israeli? I thought that you had fixed her up with your friend Paul.”

  Rhodes shifts his own gears as quickly as he can, happy to be released from contemplation of the despondent Angela. “Paul was just looking for a little amiable company that one night. Anyway, he’s off at sea now. —The Israeli, eh? How often has she been seeing him?”

  “Every couple of nights ever since the Sausalito evening.”

  Rhodes considers mat. He doesn’t care, basically, except that Jolanda and Isabelle are good friends, and this brings up the possibility that another disagreeable evening in Enron’s company may soon be forced upon him.

  Isabelle says, “He’s invited her to take a trip with him, you know.”

  “A trip? Where?”

  “Some space habitat. I don’t remember which one.”

  Rhodes smiles. “He’s a shrewd one, isn’t he? Jolanda’s been dying to go to the L-5s for years now. I thought that guy she knows in LA. was going to take her up there, but here’s Enron making his move first. —Of course, it’s never very hard for a man to get Jolanda’s attention.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Isabelle asks crisply.

  Oh-oh.

  The voice of cold steel has abruptly returned, and the basilisk eyes. Rhodes sees that he has stepped in things again.

  He hesitates. “Well—that Jolanda is a hearty, healthy girl, full of robust appetites—”

  “An easy lay, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Look, Isabelle, I didn’t intend—”

  “But that’s what you think she is, don’t you?” She’s off as fiercely as before, glaring, pacing, tugging. “That’s why you set her up with your old buddy Paul. A sure thing, a night’s fun for him.”

  Well, of course. And Isabelle knows it too. This is a group of adults; Jolanda is no nun, and neither is Isabelle. It’s a lot too late to start praising Jolanda for her chastity. Isabelle, in defending her friend, is only looking for a fight. But Rhodes doesn’t dare say any of that.

  He doesn’t dare say a thing.

  Isabelle says it for him. “She’ll sleep with anybody, that’s what you told Paul. Right?”

  “Not in so many words. But—for Christ’s sake!—listen, Isabelle, you know as well as I do that Jolanda gets around a lot. A lot.”

  “Has she slept with you?”

  “Isabelle!”

  “Well, has she?”

  In fact, she has. Rhodes isn’t sure whether Isabelle knows that Jolanda tells Isabelle all sorts of things, but perhaps has not told her that. He wonders what to say, not wanting events to escalate into real wildness tonight, but not wanting to get caught in a lie, either. He decides to temporize.

  “What has that got to do with anything?” he asks.

  “Has she or hasn’t she, Nick?”

  A deep breath. All right, give her what she wants to know.

  “Yes. Once.”

  “Christ!”

  “You were out of town. She came over. I don’t remember when this was. The day was really hot, a record breaker, and we went to the beach, and afterward—”

  “All right. You don’t have to play back the whole video for me.” She has turned her back on him, and is standing like a marble statue by the window.

  “Isabelle—”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “You want me to leave?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Are we going to break up over this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”

  He senses a wavering in her voice, a softening. The old approach-avoidance thing, one of her specialties. Rhodes goes to her sideboard and pours himself a drink, a stiff one. Only then does he realize that he already has an unfinished one on the table. He takes a deep pull from the new drink and sets it down beside the other one.

  “You can stay if you like,” she says indifferently, from very far away, no energy in her voice. “Or not, whichever you prefer.”

  “I’m sorry, Isabelle.”

  “About what?”

  “Jolanda.”

  “Forget it What difference does it make?” He is afraid for a moment that Isabelle now is going to confess some outside affair of her own. Intending, by telling him about it, either to punish him or to help him ease his guilt. Either way, he doesn’t want to hear anything like that from her, if there is anything to hear. As for him, Jolanda had been his only lapse. Going to bed with her that time had been almost automatic, unthinking: she had seemed to regard it as no more than a nice thing to do at the end of the evening, that one time, a cheerful little social grapple, meaning nothing, leading nowhere. And he had gone tumbling right along.

  “Listen, Isabelle—”

  Rhodes goes across the room to her and reaches toward her, letting his fingers come lightly to rest on her shoulders.

  His hands are trembling. The muscles of her back are knotted. They feel like slabs of cast iron.

  “I’d like to stay,” he tells her.

  “Whatever you want.” Same distant tone.

  “You knew, didn’t you? About Jolanda and me?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Then why—”

  “To see what you’d say.”

  “I get a gold star for being honest, at least.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I guess you do. Look, I’m going inside to finish what I was doing, okay?”

  She walks away from his touch. Rhodes returns to the middle of the room, to his two drinks, finishes one, then the other, and after a while pours himself a third. It is terrible rotgut: Isabelle has some perverse fondness for the worst brands. But h
e drinks what she has, anyway. No doubt this is one of the cheap algae-mash kinds, a real scandal that they dare to call it Scotch. Still, though: given a choice between bad liquor and no liquor, he will uncomplainingly drink bad, and plenty of it. Sometimes his own capacity amazes him, these days. He hears Isabelle getting ready for bed, eventually, and goes in to join her. It is past midnight and he is exhausted. Despite the air-conditioning the hot, stale night air from outside somehow has invaded her apartment, ghostly tendrils of smelly crud gliding right through the walls, filling every room from floor to ceiling with a heavy choking fug.

  She faces away from him in the darkness. Rhodes strokes her back.

  “Don’t” Sepulchral voice.

  “Isabelle—”

  “No. It’s late.”

  He lies there stiffly, wide-awake. He can tell that she remains awake too. Time goes by: half an hour, an hour. A siren wails somewhere along the freeway. Rhodes thinks back over the evening, wondering why it had worked out this way.

  She’s upset about the girl, Angela. That’s it. A threat to her sense of professional competence. And she’s probably fond of the girl, too. Countertransference, they call that. Not surprising. But then, the whole Jolanda business—

  He reaches for her, touches her again.

  Iron muscles. Rigid body.

  He wants her desperately. Always does, every single night. His hand curves around past her arm and comes to rest on the soft mound of her right breast. Isabelle’s breasts are the only soft things about her: her body is lean, taut, athletic. She doesn’t move. Gently he caresses her. Breathes on the nape of her neck. No response. She could almost be dead.

  Then she says, finally, “All right, if you want it so badly. Let’s get it over with!”

  Rolls over, turns around. Glares at him, spreads her legs.

  “Isabelle, for God’s sake—”

  “Come on! What are you waiting for!”

  Of course he doesn’t want it to be like this, not at all. Except that he is helpless with her, and when she tugs him brusquely into place on top of her, he is unable to resist. Quickly, miserably, he enters her—despite everything, she is lathered and ready—and her hips begin to move, driving him remorselessly onward toward a speedy finish. He covers her face with grateful kisses; but at the same time he is shocked, horrified, stunned by what they are doing. It is an angry, murderous fuck, the death of love. When he comes he bursts into tears.