Midnight

'Because it is.'

'But it's also full of fun—'

'No.'

'— and beauty—'

'No.'

'— and hope—'

'Bullshit.'

'It is.'

'It isn't.'

'Yes, it is.'

'It isn't.'

'Why are you so negative?'

'Because I want to be.'

'But why do you want to be?'

'Jesus, you're relentless.'

'Pointer Sisters, 'Neutron Dance.'' She sang a bit, dancing in place as she put eggshells and other scraps down the garbage disposal. Then she interrupted her tune to say, 'What could've happened to you to make you feel that life's only mean and hard?'

'You don't want to know.'

'Yes, I do.'

He finished with the cheese and put down the slicer. 'You really want to know?'

'I really do.'

'My mother was killed in a traffic accident when I was just seven. I was in the car with her, nearly died, was actually trapped in the wreckage with her for more than an hour, face to face, staring into her eyeless socket, one whole side of her head bashed in. After that I had to go live with my dad, whom she'd divorced, and he was a mean-tempered son of a bitch, an alcoholic, and I can't tell you how many times he beat me or threatened to beat me or tied me to a chair in the kitchen and left me there for hours at a time, until I couldn't hold myself any more and peed in my pants, and then he'd finally come to untie me and he'd see what I'd done and he'd beat me for that.'

He was surprised by how it all spilled from him, as if the floodgates of his subconscious had been opened, pouring forth all the sludge that had been pent up through long years of stoic self-control.

'So as soon as I graduated from high school, I got out of that house, worked my way through junior college, living in cheap rented rooms, shared my bed with armies of cockroaches every night, then applied to the Bureau as soon as I could, because I wanted to see justice in the world, be a part of bringing justice to the world, maybe because there'd been so little fairness or justice in my life. But I discovered that more than half the time justice doesn't triumph. The bad guys get away with it, no matter how hard you work to bring them down, because the bad guys are often pretty damned clever, and the good guys never allow themselves to be as mean as they have to be to get the job done. But at the same time, when you're an agent, mainly what you see is the sick underbelly of society, you deal with the scum, one kind of scum or another, and day by day it makes you more cynical, more disgusted with people and sick of them.'

He was talking so fast that he was almost breathless.

She had stopped singing.

He continued with an uncharacteristic lack of emotional control, speaking so fast that his sentences sometimes ran together, 'And my wife died, Karen, she was wonderful, you'd have liked her, everybody liked her, but she got cancer and she died, painfully, horribly, with a lot of suffering, not easy like Ali McGraw in the movies, not with just a sigh and a smile and a quiet goodbye, but in agony. And then I lost my son too. Oh, he's alive, sixteen, nine when his mother died and sixteen now, physically alive and mentally alive, but he's emotionally dead, burnt out in his heart, cold inside, so damned cold inside. He likes computers and computer games and television, and he listens to black metal. You know what black metal is? It's heavy-metal music with a twist of satanism, which he likes because it tells him there are no moral values, that everything is relative, that his alienation is right, that his coldness inside is right, it tells him that whatever feels good is good. You know what he said once?'

She shook her head.

'He said to me, 'People aren't important. People don't count. Only things are important. Money is important, liquor is important, my stereo is important, anything that makes me feel good is important, but I'm not important. He tells me that nuclear bombs are important because they'll blow up all those nice things some day, not because they'll blow up people — after all, people are nothing, just polluting animals that spoil the world. That's what he says. That's what he tells me he believes. He says he can prove it's all true. He says that next time you see a bunch of people standing around a Porsche, admiring the car, look real hard at their faces and you'll see that they care more about that car than about each other. They're not admiring the workmanship, either, not in the sense that they're thinking about the people who made the car. It's as if the Porsche was organic, as if it grew or somehow made itself. They admire it for itself, not for what it represents of human engineering skills and craftsmanship. The car is more alive than they are. They draw energy from the car, from the sleek lines of it, from the thrill of imagining its power under their hands, so the car becomes more real and and far more important than any of the people admiring it.'

'That's bullshit,' Tessa said with conviction.

'But that's what he tells me, and I know it's crap, and I try to reason with him, but he's got all the answers — or thinks he has. And sometimes I wonder … if I wasn't so soured on life myself, so sick of so many people, would I be able to argue with them more persuasively? If I wasn't who I am, would I be more able to save my son?'

He stopped.

He realized he was trembling.

They were both silent for a moment.

Then he said, 'That's why I say life is hard and mean.'

'I'm sorry, Sam.'

'Not your fault.'

'Not yours either.'

He sealed the Cheddar in a piece of Saran Wrap and returned it to the refrigerator while she returned to the pancake mix she was making.

'But you had Karen,' she said. 'There's been love and beauty in your life.'

'Sure.'

'Well, then—'

'But it doesn't last.'

'Nothing lasts forever.'

'Exactly my point,' he said.

'But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a blessing while we have it. If you're always looking ahead, wondering when this moment of joy is going to end, you can never know any real pleasure in life.'

'Exactly my point,' he repeated.

She left the wooden mixing spoon in the big metal bowl and turned to face him. 'But that's wrong. I mean, life is filled with moments of wonder, pleasure, joy … and if we don't seize the moment, if we don't sometimes turn off thoughts of the future and relish the moment, then we'll have no memory of joy to carry us through the bad times — and no hope.'

He stared at her, admiring her beauty and vitality. But then he began to think about how she would age, grow infirm, and die just as everything died, and he could no longer bear to look at her. Instead he turned his gaze to the rain-washed window above the sink. 'Well, I'm sorry if I've upset you, but you'll have to admit you asked for it. You insisted on knowing how I could be such a Gloomy Gus.'

'Oh, you're no Gloomy Gus,' she said. 'You go way beyond that. You're a regular Dr. Doom.'

He shrugged.