Cold Night

even though there was only a matter of minutes between them, it might as well be eternity.

Above, through the windshield, Venus was pushed below the horizon, leaving Mars to stare at him like an evil eye.

He pulled off the highway. There was a gas station and it was closed, and then there was a country store with an outside phone but the receiver was dead. And then there was a bar and the music was loud from the jukebox, and an early drunk was telling his friend about the bass he caught-but there was a phone and he put change into it and there was ringing and ringing and then she picked it up.

'I found the key, Jack,' she said tonelessly. 'In the hollowed trunk like you said.'

He knew her voice; it was his own voice in the times when the numbness had taken him over. It was not calm; it was beyond that in a place where there was a clarity that was pure and absolute.

'Rebecca, listen to me-'

'I'm going to kill myself, Jack. You know that. This is the way it had to be all along and you can't stop me from doing it. Dannon was the last. Will you listen to me, Jack? I love you, please listen to me.'

'Oh, God, Rebecca-' -

'Listen to me, Jack.'

Her voice was like his finger had been when it was on the trigger of his.38, when it had become him, and if he did not listen to her she would hang up and he would lose her then and there.

'Yes,' he said.

'In the beginning, when I found out who I really am, I used to think a lot about being a Grumbach. And I knew in my heart that I would have been a different person if my real father had raised me. I know there are some things that would have been the same no matter what, but I was sure that there were a lot of things that were put into me by the Grumbachs, things that made me what I am, that would have been different.

'That was the worst thing. Realizing that they had robbed me of who I was supposed to be. And all because the woman who I had known as my mother had decided that she wanted three little girls and that no one was going to stop her from having them.

'My father felt guilty about what my mother had done, but it didn't seem to matter to him whether we were there or not. But my mother wanted us, and we became what she wanted us to be. Gloria was the worst; when she found out who she really was she agreed with my mother that she was lucky. That made my mother very proud.

'I killed my mother. She was drinking one night and I broke apart two dozen sleeping pills and mixed a good bit of the powder in with each of her scotches. Dolores knew about it but said nothing; she said she would help me kill my father but she couldn't and then when I did she couldn't handle it and she killed herself.'

There was silence; the faint whistle of electricity running through wires.

'When I murdered my father I took one of his guns, and I made him go to that hotel with me. I made him stand on a chair and tie the rope to the ceiling, and then make a noose at the other end and put it around his neck. He didn't think I was going to kill him. He thought it was some kind of game; he kept saying, 'Whatever the problem is, I'll give you the money for it.' I made him address the envelope to be left at the Mallard, and then call you. I told him what to say. When he got to the part about hanging himself I kicked the chair out from under him.'

Her voice was tired, distant, little above the faint whistle of electricity. 'I wanted to make them all hang themselves, but it just didn't work out that way.'

She stopped speaking, and for a moment Paine thought she was gone. He put more change into the telephone, and was about to call her name when she spoke again. She sounded very far away from him, on Mars.

'I used you, Jack. I couldn't get beyond Paterna by myself and I needed someone to find out who the rest of them were. I'm sorry I did that. I fell in love with you very quickly.

'I want you to remember that, Jack. I love you. If none of this had happened, I could have loved you for a long time. If there's anywhere after this, I still will.'

She was beyond Mars, in the cold reaches of space. 'Don't try to follow me. I know you as well as you know yourself, because in many ways we're the same, and I know that you don't have it in you to do what I'm going to do. You're too good for that. You might go to the edge, and peer over, but something will always hold you and keep you from falling. When you find me tonight you might want to follow, and you might think you can, but you can't. Maybe you'll think of me as holding you from now on.'

Her voice became even farther away, dreamy. 'There's something for you at the Mallard Hotel, Jack. It's addressed to Mr. Johnson. Please tell me you'll take care of it. It will end all this forever.'

From her voice, he knew the moment was coming. 'Rebecca-'

'Promise me, Jack.'

'Oh, God, I promise. Rebecca-'

'I'm going to hang myself, Jack.'

He screamed into the phone but he heard the receiver drop and heard her cry out, a muffled 'Oh' that sounded almost like release.

Outside, the night was silent and cold as death. Overhead, Mars was gone now, too, eaten by the horizon, but there were stars like spread gems, blue, yellow and white, and there, just overhead, the thumb-smudge of the Hercules cluster, Ml3, that he had looked at with Tom what seemed like a universe ago.

The constellation Gemini was pushing its autumn stars up overhead. Gemini-the mythological twins Castor and Pollux, only one of whom was immortal. Castor and Pollux, special protectors of warriors.

In the sky, Gemini wheeled north.

Paine followed.

TWENTY-FOUR

Cold night. The gun, the bottle. For Paine, this time, there was no third choice. No A.A. meetings, no sincere bullshit, no upbeat slogans about 'learning to like yourself.' No suicide-prevention hot line this time, no cool, calm voices coming out of the phone, trying to climb into the dark crawlspace in his head ('Where are you? What are you doing now? When did you start to feel like this?').

Tonight it was the gun, the bottle.

Hartman's.44 lay on the ground next to him. He sat with his back against the observatory, staring up into a sky that might as well be empty of stars. The telescope was blind, its dome sealed against the intrusion of starlight. Above, the stars of Hercules and Gemini dominated the sky, but Paine was as blind to their inevitable passage as the telescope.

Next to the.44 was the long, square bottle of Jim Beam he had bought in the bar. The bartender had given him an odd look, but the twenty-dollar bill Paine had given him made the odd look disappear. Paine had almost forgotten what a bar smelled like; the distinctive, hidden-alcohol smell. All those bottles side by side, snugly shelved up to the ceiling, enough to make a man drunk for a month or two-all the weight of that potential bender seeping through the bottle glass into the dry close air. The Jim Beam's white plastic twist cap was marred where his fingers had worried it open and closed. He had fought the idea of starting immediately, outside the bar, emptying the bourbon into his stomach and mind, not even waiting to get up north.

He stared at the bottle of bourbon. This is why we are called thinking beings, he thought. An animal would have used the gun or the bourbon by now, and thus made room on the planet for more, better animals. But not man. To the end he was an animal with a plan. He would argue with himself constantly, think about the things that had happened to him, try to feel sorry for himself and the others he had dragged through his life even as he had been dragged through it himself. Man, it seemed, always manufactured choices for himself.

The gun, the bottle.

The gun…

He remembered the first time he had picked up a gun. His father had been cleaning it in his study, and then the phone rang and he had gone to answer it in the hallway. Paine had come running in with his baseball glove to ask if he could go to the ball field with his friends. He saw the door to the study open, heard his father on the phone