Summer Cool

'It's true. I thought it might have something to do with this job you're working with him on.'

Hermano shook his head even more vigorously. 'No, no, no. Can't be. He can't be gone.'

'He is.'

'Es'cuse me, man,' Hermano said. He fumbled for the door latch, got the door open just in time to vomit into the street. The small boom box started to slip down off his lap and Paine reached over, putting it back onto the seat.

Hermano retched four or five times, stayed hunched over breathing deeply, then slowly straightened. He closed the car door, locked it. He looked ill when he turned back to Paine.

'You not shitting me, are you?'

'He's gone. Told his wife he's not coming back.'

'That's bad. That's very bad. You know, Bobby, he was acting a little edgy I saw him yesterday. I got scared, man. Petty never make me scared before. I jus' thought it was trouble with Coleman, trouble at home.' A glimmer of hope sparked into his face. 'You here to pick up for him?'

Paine shook his head. 'Coleman wanted me back on the force, but I said no.'

Hermano was shaking his head again, slowly this time. 'Very bad. That Coleman, he'll chuck me to the shit pile now. He never liked Bobby at all. He'll never keep Bobby's promise. They'll put me back in the house. That's something I can't do no more of. No more of that shit. I like women, women like me, no more of that shit. .

'From what I heard, it sounded like they need you.'

Hermano brightened. 'Really?' His hope dimmed. 'No. You heard that from Coleman. Coleman is mean. That Coleman was in the marines, they taught him stuff. Him and that Dannon, they had me in the cellar room once, and they beat me up bad. Dannon liked it. I don't know if Coleman liked it, but he did it. He doesn't know what Bobby had. We had almost nothing. These Jamaicans, they not letting me in yet. Bobby knew that. He told Coleman we were in, the thing was set, we'd be ready to go soon. Bobby was covering my ass.' He looked up, smiling like a dead man. 'Guess he can't cover it no more, right?'

Paine said nothing.

'I can't do no more of that shit,' Hermano said. He groped for his boom box, cradled it, opened the door of the car. 'Thanks, Paine,' he said. 'I always like you.'

He got out, slammed the door.

When Paine turned to see where Hermano had gone, he had already disappeared.

5

Bad dreams.

Paine knew the drill. Get into bed, watch the ceiling for a while until blackness recedes, the pupils adjust, and you can see the whirls of nightlight move across the plaster. A tapestry of life, if you want it to be. Sometimes waking dreams were better_; the control room was more at your command, the bad thoughts more easily shunted aside. Sometimes the bad thoughts came anyway, and you felt just sorry enough for yourself, just sufficiently depressed, that you let them wash over you like a black tide, finding that the oily water has bobbed you to the surface and you are floating in shadow light, under the moon of your own past.

There were all kinds of bad dreams. In the past, a century ago in Paine's thirty years, he had taken beer and bourbon to watch the dreams develop. Now he took neither, but the habit his mind had formed with the aid of alcohol had not abandoned him with the departure of the poison.

Rebecca.

Tonight, Paine searched for her on his ceiling tapestry. Paine thought about the gun he had once kept in his bedside table. After meeting Rebecca, he had taken the gun out one night and it had felt like a metal bird in his hand. He had looked down at it and then put it to his head and said, 'Bang.' The bird-gun had said 'Click.' There had been no bullets in it, at least not that night_; it was only much later, when it was too late, that he had understood why his mock self-execution had mirrored Rebecca's real one_; how what she was, the thing that she knew and would not tell him until it was too late, had defined his life from that night onward.

She had been him, Paine's own mirror image, and when she finally told him what he must have known (perhaps he had known it in his dreams-but not on waking, in the tapestry, where it might have done him some good) it was from a short ten miles away on a telephone whose line stretched not ten miles but the opposite way, six thousand miles around the world, because when he had reached her it was too late and she was gone.

'I know that you don't have it in you to do what I'm going to do,' she had told him. 'You might go to the edge, and peer over, but something will always hold you and keep you from failing. Maybe you'll think of me as holding you from now on,' and she had been right, and he had known himself for the first time.

But Rebecca was gone. He had lost his mirror self. And even now, always, he would believe that if he had reached her, or been more aware of himself, he could have kept his mirror sell with him forever He could have looked into his own eyes, into his own mind, and seen that part of him that did want to do it, and reach into the mirror, through the looking glass, like Alice, and fix the part in her that wanted self-destruction, truly wanted it, and make it live. He had loved her, and she had known that. But it hadn't been enough.

The telephone line had stretched away from him, all around the world, and he had been too late to find out what would have been enough, beyond love, to save her.

Because Paine was sometimes a romantic fool, he thought of her often when he was using the telescope. She had told him, on that phone before she let the receiver drop and hung herself, 'I want you to remember that, Jack. I love you. If there's anywhere after this, I still will.' When he used the big white tube to peer into the darkness of space, to find the delicate tendrils of glowing gas, the sparkling pinpoints of colored light called stars, the soft, infinitely distant whirls of light that were galaxies, he thought of her as between the stars, between the worlds, perhaps looking down at the distant earth, so tiny to her after death, and seeing him. He knew it was foolish to search for her in the black cold between stars, but it was a way for him to know that she was still with him.

Maybe you'll think of me as holding you from now on. He was foolish and romantic enough, and knew himself well enough now, to do that.

He searched for Rebecca in the ceiling tapestry, in the waking dream that rolled over plaster, as always; but tonight Bob Petty's face appeared to him. And it was not Bobby's face he saw so much as Terry's. He saw them together, and knew that what he saw could not be false. All the years they had been together, the looks of secret life that had passed between them, could not have been manufactured by either. They had fought, and loudly_; sometimes they had come to the edge of fissure. But there had been something in their union, some dovetailing, that had always locked them so tightly together, for all the world to see, that what had happened, what seemed to have happened, had to be false. They had worked at their marriage; had realized from the very beginning that love was work, and over the years that Paine had watched them, the work had produced something as tight and true, at the core, as any work of art.

Paine believed in secret lives. He believed it because he knew it to be true. All men keep secrets, especially from themselves, and all unions have secret lives. But the essential self is rarely hidden to those who really look. Most of our lives are spent in self-absorption_; our dealings with those others of our species are carried out in the most superficial fashion. The neighbor is always startled on hearing that the 'nice, quiet boy' next door has murdered his family; that same neighbor would blush with embarrassment on reflection, to realize that for the fifteen years he'd known the nice, quiet boy, he had had no interaction of consequence with him.

All men have secret sins. Paine believed this implicitly. He could believe in Bobby Petty's infidelity; could believe in any of a number of secret sins: gambling, transsexualism, homosexuality. No revelation, no tiny room exposed when the secret key was turned, would surprise him.

But just as all men have secret lives, so too do they have essential selves, and these they wear like a shroud. No mask can hide it from those who look. Had that neighbor chosen to look to the human being, not the docile mask, of the boy next door, he might have discovered the six-year-old who killed frogs for the pleasure of it, the eight-year-old who torched the curtains in the living room to test the reaction of his distant parents. The essential self leaves clues no man can hide. It transcends the secret self.

Bobby Petty had violated his essential self. Whatever his secret life, he had done something to destroy what