Hot Sky at Midnight

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.