Free In the Dead of Summer by Gillian Roberts

replaying that moment in my head.”
    “Air-conditionin’s feebin’ out at my place.”
    I gave up. His litany, even told in a lilting good ol’ boy from Louisiana voice as it was, and even sprinkled with glints of humor and self-awareness, as it now and then was, made me want to hold up a great silver cross and run for the hills. I again reminded myself that the morose man sharing my blanket wasn’t really Mackenzie, but Mackenzie’s doppelgänger who, I trusted, would disappear when the cast and reduced mobility were gone.
    “What were those wise words by Epicurious?” I asked. “Weren’t they about attitude?” Philosopher, know thyself.
    A violinist walked on stage, generating scattered applause. Slowly, the violinist’s fellow orchestra members straggled on and arranged themselves, their music, and their instruments, which, as usual, needed tuning. I never understood why they didn’t take care of this backstage.
    “Who’s Epicurious?” Mackenzie asked. “Sounds like a clown.”
    My compassion reservoir was drained, its last droplets drying in the hot sunset. “Epi-whatever, damn it! He who said something about men being tormented with the opinions they have of things, not the things themselves, that’s who. Don’t you listen to your own wise quotations? Life isn’t that bad if you’ll look at it differently. You have all the time in the world to catch up on everything you always wished you had all the time in the world for, including memorizing Greek quotations.”
    “ Epictetus,” he said. “The Stoic philosopher.”
    Which only proves that you can lead a man to stoicism, but you can’t make it stick.
    “He believed that there is only one thing which is fully our own—our will, or purpose. We aren’t responsible for the ideas that come our way, only for how we respond to them. As for me, I am puttin’ my downtime to use. I’m studyin’.”
    Studying how to pontificate, and getting really good at it. “Greek lit, by any chance?”
    “Why’d you say that?”
    “Elementary, my dear Watson, given that Epictetus comes to mind so readily.”
    He raised one eyebrow and said nothing. I got the message. A well-educated human being already knew who Epictetus was. My ignorance was so humiliating he spared any mention of it. “Studyin’ Philadelphia history,” he said. “I told you.”
    “You did. What are you up to now?”
    “The yellow fever epidemic.”
    Still? The actual epidemic had lasted a shorter time than Mackenzie was giving over to the study of it.
    “Real depressin’. Not only what happened, but also ’cause it’s eerie, lots of parallels to today, to our plague. Nobody knew where it came from, what to do, so they blamed it on refugees from Santo Domingo. That’s today’s Haiti. Sound familiar?”
    “Why in God’s name are you still reading about it?” I asked. “Lighten up! It’s summer. You’re supposed to read fluff. Beach books.”
    “I got shot at the beach. And I like history.”
    “Then read happy history.” Except I couldn’t think of any. “You’ve got a few hundred years’ worth to pick from—why that? Why not sanitized, whitewashed textbook history where anything our side did was for the greater good, out of pure motives, and for the best?”
    “I want to read history ,” he said, as if that were an answer. “What I’m reading is history.”
    “Speaking of which,” I said, “April’s paper on immigration is called ‘Wretched Refuse.’ Don’t you think that’s a negative—”
    “They thought tobacco prevented it.”
    “Immigration?”
    “Yellow fever.”
    I took a deep breath. He wasn’t himself. “I didn’t know that,” I said. “But I’m worried about April. She overreacted to Romeo and Juliet , and seems really troubled.” A mote that had seemed peripheral and had been resting in a side pocket of my brain floated into center field. “She ran away from the fountain Friday. Barefoot. Right at the time the others chased a boy.