Hot Sky at Midnight

He was ready, as always. “Magnificent, wholly magnificent. I was scarcely prepared fully enough for the intensity of it. What I felt was—”

“No! Don’t tell me! It has to stay private—it’s your personal experience of the work. No two are alike. And I wouldn’t presume to ask you to put the essentially nonverbal into words. It would spoil it for you, don’t you think?”

“Indeed.”

“Shall we do Tower of the Heart next?”

“Please.”

She touched each electrode, as if adjusting the receptors in some minor way, and went to the cupboard again.

Tower of the Heart was wide, squat, not in any way towerlike that Enron could see. The glow of its internal workings was of a deeper hue than the other’s, violet blue rather than golden pink. Approaching it, he felt very little at first, and then came some of the queasiness he had felt with the first sculpture, indeed pretty much the same sensation. So it is all foolishness, he thought, a mild electric current that gives you the twitches and some gentle discomfort, and then you pretend that you have had a deeply moving aesthetic experience which—

Suddenly, without warning, he found himself on the verge of an orgasm.

It was immensely embarrassing. Not only was it his intention to save that orgasm for better use a little later in the evening, but the whole idea of losing control this way, of staining his clothes like a schoolboy, was infuriating to him. He fought it. The emanations coming from the second sculpture were far stronger than those of the first, and it was a struggle for him. His face, he knew, must be ablaze with shame and rage, and his erection was so powerful that it made him ache. He didn’t dare look down to see if it showed. But he fought. It had probably been thirty years since he had had to fight so desperately against the release of pleasure: not since the hairtrigger days of his hot adolescence. His mind was filled with thoughts of Jolanda Bermudez’s overflowing body, her immense swaying breasts, her hot slippery throbbing hole. She was devouring him, she was engulfing him, carrying him away on a tide of ecstasy. Think of anything, he ordered himself sternly. Think of the Dead Sea, the harsh metallic taste of its water, the thick slimy coating on your skin after you emerge from it. Think of the Mosque of Omar’s golden dome shining in the noon sun. Think of the nauseating ball of greenhouse gases that surrounds the spinning globe of Earth. Think of yesterday’s stock-market quotations—of toothpaste—of oranges—of the Sistine Chapel—

—of camels in the marketplace at Beersheba—

—of lamb kebabs sizzling over a grill—

—of the coral reefs at Eilat—

—of—of the—the—

But the pressure lifted, just then. The surging tide of his blood receded; his erection subsided. Enron caught his breath and forced himself back toward calmness.

The room was very quiet. He had to make himself look toward her. When he did, he saw that she was smiling—slyly, knowingly, perhaps? Was she aware of what had happened? Impossible to tell. She must know what effect the work had had on him. On the other hand, everyone was supposed to respond to these things differently. A purely subjective art form.

He would reveal nothing. As she said, a person’s experience of her art was his own private business. “Extraordinary,” he told her. “Unforgettable.” His voice, hoarse and breathy, sounded almost unrecognizable in his own ears.

“I’m so glad you liked it. And shall we do the Agamemnon now?” she asked cheerily.

“In a little while, maybe. I would like to—savor what I have already been shown. To think about it, if I may.” Enron was sweating as though he had just done a ten-kilometer race. “Is that all right? That we wait until later for the third one?”

“It can be overwhelming, sometimes,” she said.

“And perhaps if there is something to drink—”

“Yes. Of course. How stupid of me, to haul you right in here so fast, without even offering you a drink!”

She got the electrodes off him and found a bottle of wine. White wine, warm, sweet. Americans! What did they know of anything that mattered? Gently Enron asked if there might be red, and she found some of that too, even worse, dusty-tasting stuff, full no doubt of baneful pollutants and ghastly insecticide residues. They left the studio and settled on a sort of divan before a long low window in one of her front rooms, and sat looking out at a sunset of stunning photochemical complexity, an astounding apocalyptic Wagnerian thing: enormous bold jagged streaks of scarlet and gold and green and violet and turquoise warring frantically with each other for possession of the sky above San Francisco. Now and then Jolanda sighed heavily and shook her shoulders in a little shiver of aesthetic joy. Ah, yes, such beauty, God’s own heaven dazzlingly illuminated by God’s own industrial contaminants.

We will go for dinner soon, Enron thought, and there I will ask her the things I must ask her, and then we will return here and I will have her right on the floor of this room, on the thick Persian carpet, and then I will go back to the city and I will never see her again; and in a pig’s eye will I let her put those electrodes back on me, not tonight or any other night.

The investigation, first, though. How to bring the subject of discourse around to the area of his main interest here? A little maneuvering would be necessary. And with all this romantic business going on in the sky—

But as it happened he was able to get down to his inquiries much sooner than he had expected. She gave him the opening he needed even as they sat watching the sunset.

“The night we all had dinner, Marty, Isabelle said you were a spy. Do you remember that?”

Enron chuckled. “Of course. A spy for Kyocera-Merck, she said.”

“Are you?”

“You are so very direct. It is charmingly American of you.”

“I was just thinking. I’ve never slept with a spy, not that I know of. Unless you are. It would be interesting to know.”

“Naturally I am,” he said. “All Israelis are spies. It is a widely known fact.”

Jolanda laughed and poured more of the abominable wine for them both.

“No. No, it is true. In our country we lived so long in a condition of dire peril, surrounded by enemies on every side, just a stone’s throw away: how could we not develop ingrained habits of watchfulness? A nation of spies, yes. Wherever we go, we look, we prowl, we lift up coverlets to find out what might be beneath. But a spy for Kyocera-Merck? No. That I am not. I do my spying for my country. It is a matter of patriotism, not of economic greed, do you see?”

“You really are serious,” she said, in wonder.

“A journalist, a spy—it is the same thing, is it not?”

“And you came here to talk to Nick Rhodes because your country wants to steal the adapto technology that he’s working on.”

She was, Enron realized, getting drunk very quickly. This conversation had veered from the merely playful into something rather different.

“Steal? I would not do that. We never steal. We license, we copy if necessary, we reinvent. Steal, no. It is forbidden by the laws of Moses. Thou shalt not steal, we are told. Imitate, yes. There is nothing in the commandments about that. And I do confess to you, freely without hesitation, that we wish to learn more about this project of your friend Dr. Rhodes, this scheme for the genetic transformation of mankind.” Enron eyed her closely. She was flushed and at least half-aroused: the heat of the evening, the wine, his no doubt apparent response to Tower of the Heart, all had been working on her. Leaning close, letting his hand rest on hers, he said in an insinuating, confidential way, “Now that I have admitted that I am a spy, you will not mind that I must do some spying now. Yes? Good.” She seemed to think he was playing a game. Very well. He was happy to amuse her. “Answer this for me,” he said. “What do you think about Rhodes, truly? Is he on to something? Are they going to produce some new kind of human being over at that laboratory of his?”

“Oh, you aren’t joking! You really are a spy!”

“Did I ever deny it? Come on.” Enron stroked her arm. Her skin was amazingly smooth, the smoothest he