The Day Before Midnight

I told you not to come up, he felt himself screaming. I didn’t hear you! I didn’t hear you!

Footsteps clambered at him.

Uckley spun, dropped to a knee, found the target picture and—

It was a child on churning legs, just a small shape in the darkness, screaming “Mommy” and coming at him.

“Get back,” he shouted, because behind the child now he saw another shape from another dark doorway, leaning out with a pistol.

Uckley dived.

He hit the little girl.

“Get down, get down, get down,” he screamed, louder than she did. He hit his head on the wall, a stunning blow. His weapons dropped away. He felt the girl squirming under him. He heard footsteps.

The man stood over him.

The little girl was screaming, “Mommy, Mommy, my mommy is dead!”

Uckley held her tight to him.

He looked up.

The man, bleeding badly, stood over him. He was a heavy blond guy with a crew cut and a thick face.

“Let the kid go, for Christ’s sake, let the kid go,” Uckley begged.

The man turned and walked away. Uckley said to the girl, “Run downstairs. Run, now!”

He picked up the pieces, and with a gun in both hands he started down the hall.

Then he heard the shot.

“If you’ve spoken to Peter,” said Megan Wilder, “then you know our relationship became spectacularly deranged at the end. I’m not sure even yet if he did it to me or I did it to him or, out of some kind of crab nebulae of neurotic energy, we did it to each other.” She laughed ironically at the lunacy of it.

The three agents watched her without cracking so much as a snicker. She thought of them as the Three Dumb Men. They just sat there, their faces slack and dull, listening. They hadn’t even taken their coats off, and it was tropical inside the studio.

Megan bent forward, trying to find a new angle into her construction. She saw now that she had committed a fundamental design error at the very beginning. She had found the circuit board to a personal computer and loved it: it was so intricate, so cunning, so full of texture and meaning; and she had put it exactly in the center of the piece. Then she had painted it hot pink with a spray can. It was an inescapable fact. It was the absolute, the total, the implacable. But that was all wrong, she saw now. Then you could not discover the image, and meet it on your terms. Rather, it hit you in the face: it was like an ugly truth that would not go away, so obvious and pitiful that it dared you to recognize it, and made you aware of your cowardice for the fact that you could not.

“This,” she said to the Three Dumb Men, pointing to it, “this has to go. It’s too clever.”

She pried the board off the backing, ripping her finger on a staple in the process. She began to bleed. She chucked the thing away, and it hit with a clatter in the far reaches of the room. Only the pink-edged silhouette was left where the board had been pulled out, and small specks of furry pink light, where the spray paint had penetrated. She liked it; it was much better that way, suggestive and elliptical rather than pontificating.

Almost at once she began to feel better about the piece. Maybe she had solved it after all; maybe there was an end to the equation in sight.

“You see, he lied. I lied too. In the end I lied more than he did. In the end all I did was lie. But Peter lied first and he lied worst. Worse, he was a coward. He didn’t tell me because he couldn’t tell me. He knew I would hold it against him, what he did. And he was right, I would have, and maybe I would have left him. But I didn’t really and truly know until I was in love with him and we were married and the gestalt had just gotten too complicated and there were no easy answers.”

She paused. “He didn’t tell me, you see, because in his heart of hearts, way, way, down, Peter is ashamed. That’s the key to him.”

The Three Dumb Men just looked at her, with their long, glum, midwestern faces, like Grant Wood’s gothic Americans.

“So here I am, married to this bombthinker with an IQ of several thousand, whom I love so desperately I think I may die from it. But he always had his mistress. That bitch. He’d never give her up, he was so selfish. To have him, I had to have her. Oh, these brilliant men, I tell you, they can be real motherfuckers. So I—”

“You mean this Maggie Berlin?” one of them interrupted.

She laughed. The idiot!

“No, no, Maggie was just another screwed-up defense genius. No, it was the other bitch. I always thought of her as a woman, you see, and I still think there was sex under it all. He laughed at me, and maybe Freud is both wrong and dead, but I think there was sex under it always, all the time, ever since the start, ever since Harvard, when he couldn’t get laid and his roommate was the big stud for peace. No, her. The bomb. He could never leave her alone. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was his Circe, his Alice Through the Looking Glass, his Ginger Lynn. He really did love her, in his way. And so she hurt me and so I chose to hurt him through her. That’s the pathology of it. Surely it’s transparent. I mean, you must see stuff like this all the time?”

The Three Dumb Men were silent.

“Well, that’s context, at any rate. It enables you to understand why I was vulnerable to Ari Gottlieb.”

She bent to the piece again. She began to regret having so summarily dismissed the computer circuit board. It occurred to her that she ought to retrieve it. But she knew to do so would be to stamp herself as an idiot forever in these men’s minds. She looked at her watch. Time was flying, wasn’t it? Getting close to five. We’re all getting older until one day, poof, Peter’s Ginger Lynn goes down on her knees, opens her mouth, and sucks off the world — the ultimate blowjob. She laughed, a little more crazily than she had intended. She felt a little like crying.

“So, anyway, Peter is the flavor of the month in Washington circles because his let’s-nuke-the-Russians number is just the tune Reagan and his chums want to hear. It’s got a good beat and they can dance to it. They give it an eighty. And suddenly he’s Mr. Bomb, he has this terrible committee job, and it’s eating up his time and he’s loving it. I admit it I couldn’t handle it. And who should show up then but Ari Gottlieb. I guess if I had to design the PJM, I’d design Ari. That’s Perfect Jewish Male. I mean, he was like Alan Bates in An Unmarried Woman, just too good to be true. He was incredibly good-looking but not in a pretty or an offputting way. In a kind way, somehow. He never raised his voice. When he laughed — oh, listen to me, I sound like I’m in a musical — when he laughed, he really made you feel like it was you and he alone in the most brilliant private joke ever told. I liked the way his skin crinkled right by his eyes, into two little deltas, like flint arrowheads. It had a nice texture to it. He was very gentle, very confident. He wasn’t afraid. Peter was rigid with fear and guilt, but Ari was without fear. When he saw you, Jesus, how he lit up! His gift was for focus. He made you feel like you were the only person in the world, there was nobody else. I met him at an opening two years back.”

“Date please.”

“Who remembers dates?”

“Could it have been January?”

“No. The weather was warm. It was very warm, I remember, because Ari and I had a Coke from one of those hot dog wagons on the street outside the Corcoran and — no, no, yes, it was January. It was a surprisingly warm January day. Peter was locked up. It had really gotten crazy with the group, Congress had just done something about putting the MXs in old silos or something and—”

“January eleven?”

“Maybe.”

She hated them. She just looked at them.

“Anyway, it was my idea. It wasn’t Ari’s idea. It was my idea. He was an Israeli