Hot Sky at Midnight

Tennessee or Kentucky?”

“I came in by way of the north route,” Carpenter said. “You can see what day I left California. There hasn’t been time for me to go anywhere but straight across the mountains and through Nebraska and Iowa.”

“You here on business?”

“Business, yes.”

A sticky moment. Carpenter was still sailing under Samurai colors: a Level Eleven salaryman, coming to Chicago for the Company. One phone call could spike that. But the Company still carried him on the roster. His megacorp affiliation got him through, on into the fumigation chamber, and on beyond it to the highway that led to Chicago.

Memphis and Cairo are sealed off, now.

Highways closed, air routes shut down, nobody goes in, nobody comes out. Memphis and Cairo might just as well have vanished from the face of the Earth. Monkeys come out of the jungles of Louisiana, doing their job for the forces of chaos, and your city disappears from the world while you wait for the Oropouche viruses, or whatever, to get into your veins and make your body swell up and turn into a bag of black blood. Lord, have mercy, Carpenter thought.

Christ, have mercy.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

In Chicago, finally, about four in the afternoon, Carpenter phoned Jeanne Gabel at the Samurai headquarters at Wacker and Michigan, and got her after only about half a minute of hunt-and-seek maneuvering.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“In a parking lot at—mmm—Monroe and Green.”

“All right. Stay there. It’ll be all right if I leave here early. I’ll come and get you.”

He sat in the car, weary and bedraggled from his journey, staring in awe and dismay at the dark smoggy sky. The air in the city was a kind of oily soup that left black smears on the car’s windshield. It was fantastically splotched and streaked with dense patches of mottled color, yellow and purple and green and blue all running together, the color of a bad bruise, with the sun glinting vaguely through the curtain of crud like a small, rusty brass coin. Carpenter had not been in this part of the country for a very long time; he had forgotten what kind of poisons lived in the air here. Everyone he saw was wearing a face-lung. He put his on, making sure it fit snugly over his cheekbones and jaw.

Jeanne arrived with surprising swiftness. Carpenter felt a surge of joy at the sight of her—the first familiar face since Oakland—and then, immediately, a crosscurrent of confusion. He had no idea why he had come here or what he wanted from her, this woman with whom he had maintained a kind of long-distance flirtatious friendship for nearly half a dozen years without ever once having kissed her on the lips.

He would have kissed her now, but that was hard, wearing a face-lung. He settled for a hug instead. She was a strong woman, Oriental in some fashion on her mother’s side but no hint of Oriental fragility about her, and she held him tightly, a good hearty squeeze.

“Come on,” she said. “You need a shower in the worst way. And then something to eat, right?”

“You bet.”

“God, it’s good to see you again, Paul.”

“Me too.”

“Things must be bad, though. I’ve never seen you looking this way.”

“Things aren’t very good,” he said. “For sure.”

Jeanne entered the car on the driver’s side and told it where to take them. As it slid into the traffic flow she said, “I checked with Personnel and Records. You don’t seem to be with the Company any more.”

“I was terminated.”

“I never heard of them doing that except for cause.”

“There was cause, Jeannie.”

She glanced across at him. “For God’s sake, what happened?”

“I screwed up,” Carpenter said. “I did what I thought was the right thing, and it was wrong. I’ll tell you all about it, if you’re interested. The main thing is, it was lots of bad publicity and it got the Company in trouble with Kyocera, and so they threw me out on my ass. It was a political thing. They had to let me go.”

“Poor Paul. They really stuck it to you, didn’t they? What will you do now?”

“Take a shower and have some sort of meal,” he said. “That’s as much of a plan as I have, right now.”

She lived in a two-room flat—a sitting room with kitchen, and a bedroom—somewhere off in one of Chicago’s western suburbs. The rooms were sealed so tightly that they felt practically airless and the cooling system was an ancient clanker, inefficient and noisy.

There wasn’t much space for guests in the little apartment. Carpenter supposed he would have to find a hotel room for the night if he didn’t want to sleep in the car again, and wondered how he was going to pay for it. Maybe Jeanne would let him sleep on the floor. He took the longest shower he dared to allow himself, perhaps six or seven minutes, and changed into fresh clothes. When he came out, she had two plates of algae cakes and soy bacon on the table, and a couple of bottles of beer.

As they ate, he told her the story, quietly and dispassionately, beginning with the distress call from Kovalcik and ending with his final conversation with Tedesco. By now it all seemed to him more like something he had seen on the evening news than anything that had actually happened to him, and he felt almost nothing as he laid out the sequence of events for her. Jeanne listened virtually without comment until the end. Then she said simply, “What a shitty deal, Paul.”

“Yes.”

“Have you thought about appealing?”

“To whom? The Pope? I’m out on my ass, Jeanne. You know that as well as I do.”

She nodded slowly. “I suppose that’s so. Oh, Paul, Paul—”

Indoors, in the hot hermetic atmosphere of the flat, they were wearing no masks. She turned toward him and he saw a look in her eyes that was bewildering in its complexity: expectable things like sorrow and compassion, and behind that what appeared to be a soft gleam of pure love, and behind that—what? Fear? Fear was what it looked like, Carpenter thought. But fear of what? Fear of him? No, he thought. Fear of herself.

Carefully he poured more beer into his glass.

She said, “How long do you plan to stay in Chicago?”

He shrugged. “A day or two, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t want to be any kind of burden for you, Jeannie. I just needed to get the hell away from California for a little while, to find some sort of safe harbor until—”

“Stay as long as you like, Paul.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I feel responsible, you know. Inasmuch as I was the one who got you that gig on the iceberg trawler.”

“That’s bullshit, Jeannie. You were the one that got me the job, sure, but I was the one who turned those people away. All by myself, I did it.”

“Yes. I understand that.”

“Tell me about you,” he said. “What have you been up to, anyway?”

“What’s there to tell? I work, I come home, I read, I sleep. It’s a nice quiet life.”

“The kind you’ve always preferred.”

“Yes.”

“Do you miss being in Paris?”

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Let’s go there,” he said. “You and me, right now. You quit your job and we’ll get a little place near the river and we’ll sing and dance in the Metro for money. It won’t be much of a living but at least we’ll be in Paris.”

“Oh, Paul. What a great idea!”

“If only we could, eh?”

“If only.” She took his hand in hers and gave it a quick little squeeze; and then she pulled back, as though the gesture had seemed too bold for her.