Fifty Degrees Below
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson is at his visionary best in this gripping cautionary tale of progress and its price as our world faces catastrophic climate change – the sequel to Forty Signs of Rain.Frank Vanderwal of the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC has been living a paleolithic lifestyle in a tree house in Rock Creek Park ever since a big flood of the Potomac destroyed his apartment block. The flood was just the beginning. It heralded a lot of bad-weather news. Now the Gulf Stream has shut down and the Antarctic ice sheet is melting.The good news is that Frank is part of an international effort by the National Science Foundation to restabilize Earth's climate. He understands the necessity for out-of-the-box thinking and he refuses to feel helpless before the indifference of the politicians and capitalists who run America.The bad news is that Frank has fallen in love – with a woman who is not who she seems. He discovers that their first meeting was no accident: he was on a list all along! Her ulterior motive is political and she expects Frank to spy for her. And thus Frank is drawn into the world of Homeland Security, and other, blacker Washington security agencies as the presidential election year heats up.Then suddenly it's winter …It's winter like the ice age, fifty degrees below. As hellish conditions disrupt the lives of even the most important people, there is a convergence of meteorological and human events with Frank at the centre – catastrophe is in the air. This unforgettable story from the master of alternate and future history brings tomorrow into new focus with startling effect.
Fifty Degrees Below
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Contents
Cover (#ud3d81e35-f793-511c-888f-7901fbf58023)
Title Page (#ue8d38f4e-feed-5351-813e-e7fef90af11f)
ONE: Primate In Forest (#u1236ab90-3c86-5d08-9f7c-6751b7761a2e)
TWO: Abrupt Climate Change (#u0e013515-217c-5323-b456-7e47159e9049)
THREE: Back To Khembalung (#uc7a2c60d-fc86-5585-ae1c-e8f15810defe)
FOUR: Is There a Technical Solution? (#litres_trial_promo)
FIVE: Autumn In New York (#litres_trial_promo)
SIX: Optimodal (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVEN: The Cold Snap (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHT: Always Generous (#litres_trial_promo)
NINE: Leap Before You Look (#litres_trial_promo)
TEN: Primavera Porteño (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#ulink_2762f923-6f53-5b6e-8222-1e43cf84a5f0)
Primate In Forest (#ulink_2762f923-6f53-5b6e-8222-1e43cf84a5f0)
Nobody likes Washington D.C. Even the people who love it don’t like it. Climate atrocious, traffic worse: an ordinary midsized gridlocked American city, in which the plump white federal buildings make no real difference. Or rather they bring all the politicians and tourists, the lobbyists and diplomats and refugees and all the others who come from somewhere else, often for suspect reasons, and thereafter spend their time clogging the streets and hogging the show, talking endlessly about their non-existent city on a hill while ignoring the actual city they are in. The bad taste of all that hypocrisy can’t be washed away even by the food and drink of a million very fine restaurants. No – bastion of the world government, locked vault of the world bank, fortress headquarters of the world police; Rome, in the age of bread and circuses; no one can like that.
So naturally when the great flood washed over the city, wreaking havoc and leaving the capital spluttering in the livid heat of a wet and bedraggled May, the stated reactions were various, but the underlying subtext often went something like this: HA HA HA. For there were many people around the world who felt that justice had somehow been served. Capital of the world, thoroughly trashed: who wouldn’t love it?
Of course the usual things were said by the usual parties. Disaster area, emergency relief, danger of epidemic, immediate restoration, pride of the nation, etc. Indeed, as capital of the world, the President was firm in his insistence that it was everyone’s patriotic duty to support rebuilding, demonstrating a brave and stalwart response to what he called ‘this act of climatic terrorism.’ ‘From now on,’ the President continued, ‘we are at a state of war with nature. We will work until we have made this city even more like it was than before.’
But truth to tell, ever since the Reagan era the conservative (or dominant) wing of the Republican party had been coming to Washington explicitly to destroy the federal government. They had talked about ‘starving the beast,’ but flooding would be fine if it came to that; they were flexible, it was results that counted. And how could the federal government continue to burden ordinary Americans when its center of operations was devastated? Why, it would have to struggle just to get back to normal! Obviously the flood was a punishment for daring to tax income and pretending to be a secular nation. One couldn’t help thinking of Sodom and Gomorrah, the prophecies specified in the Book of Revelation, and so on.
Meanwhile, those on the opposite end of the political spectrum likewise did not shed very many tears over the disaster. As a blow to the heart of the galactic imperium it was a hard thing to regret. It might impede the ruling caste for a while, might make them acknowledge, perhaps, that their economic system had changed the climate, and that this was only the first of many catastrophic consequences. If Washington was denied now that it was begging for help, that was only what it had always done to its environmental victims in the past. Nature bats last – poetic justice – level playing field – reap what you sow – rich arrogant bastards – and so on.
Thus the flood brought pleasure to both sides of the aisle. And in the days that followed Congress made it clear in their votes, if not in their words, that they were not going to appropriate anything like the amount of money it would take to clean up the mess. They said it had to be done; they ordered it done; but they did not fund it.
The city therefore had to pin its hopes on either the beggared District of Columbia, which already knew all there was to know about unfunded mandates from Congress, to the extent that for years their license plates had proclaimed ‘Taxation Without Representation;’ or on the federal agencies specifically charged with disaster relief, like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers and others that could be expected to help in the ordinary course of their missions (and budgets).
Experts from these agencies tried to explain that the flood did not have a moral meaning, that it was merely a practical problem in city management, which had to be solved as a simple matter of public health, safety and convenience. The Potomac had ballooned into a temporary lake of about a thousand square miles; it had lasted no more than a week, but in that time inflicted great damage to the infrastructure. Much of the public part of the city was trashed. Rock Creek had torn out its banks, and the Mall was covered by mud; the Tidal Basin was now part of the river again, with the Jefferson Memorial standing in the shallows of the current. Many streets were blocked with debris; worse, in transport terms, many Metro tunnels had flooded, and would take months to repair. Alexandria was wrecked. Most of the region’s bridges were knocked out or suspect. The power grid was uncertain, the sewage system likewise; epidemic disease was a distinct possibility.
Given all this, certain repairs simply had to be made, and many were the calls for full restoration. But whether these calls were greeted with genuine agreement, Tartuffian assent, stony indifference, or gloating opposition, the result was the same; not enough money was appropriated to complete the job.
Only the essentials were dealt with. Necessary infrastructure, sure, almost; and of course the nationally famous buildings were cleaned up, the Mall replanted with grass and new cherry trees; the Vietnam Memorial excavated, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials recaptured from their island state. Congress debated a proposal to leave the high-water mark of greenish mud on the sides of the Washington Monument, as a flood-height record and a reminder of what could happen. But few wanted such a reminder, and in the end they rejected the idea. The stone of the great plinth was steam-cleaned, and around it the Mall began to look as if the flood had never happened. Elsewhere in the city, however …
It was not a good time to have to look for a place to live.
And yet this was just what Frank Vanderwal had to do. He had leased his apartment for a year, covering the time he had planned to work for the National Science Foundation; then he had agreed to stay on for a second year. Now, only a month after the flood, his apartment had to be turned over to its owner, a State Department foreign service person he had never met, returning from a stint in Brazil. So he had to find someplace else.
No doubt the decision to stay another year had been a really bad idea.
This thought had weighed on him as he searched for a new apartment, and as a result he had not persevered as diligently as he ought to have. Very little was available in any case, and everything on offer was prohibitively expensive. Thousands of people had been drawn to D.C. by a flood that had also destroyed thousands of residences, and damaged thousands more beyond immediate repair and reoccupation. It was a real seller’s market, and rents shot up accordingly.
Many of the places Frank had looked at were also physically repulsive in the extreme, including some that had been thrashed by the storm and not entirely cleaned up: the bottom of the barrel, still coated with sludge. The low point in this regard came in one semi-basement hole in Alexandria, a tiny dark place barred for safety at the door and the single high window, so that it looked like a prison for troglodytes; and two thousand a month. After that Frank’s will to hunt was gone.
Now the day of reckoning had come. He had cleared out and cleaned up, the owner was due home that night, and Frank had nowhere to go.
It was a strange sensation. He sat at the kitchen counter in the dusk, strewn with the various sections of the Post. The ‘Apartments for Rent’ section was less than a column long, and Frank had learned enough of its code by now to know that it held nothing for him. More interesting had been an article in the day’s Metro section about Rock Creek Park. Officially closed due to severe flood damage, it was apparently too large for the over-extended National Park Service to be able to enforce the edict. As a result the park had become something of a no-man’s land, ‘a return to wilderness,’ as the article had put it.
Frank surveyed the apartment. It held no more memories for him than a hotel room, as he had done nothing but sleep there. That was all he had needed out of a home, his life proper having been put on hold until his return to San Diego. Now, well … it was like some kind of premature resuscitation, on a voyage between the stars. Time to wake up, time to leave the deep freeze and find out where he was.
He got up and went down to his car.
Out to the Beltway to circle north and then east, past the elongated Mormon temple and the great overpass graffiti referencing it: GO HOME DOROTHY! Get off on Wisconsin, drive in toward the city. There was no particular reason for him to visit this part of town. Of course the Quiblers lived over here, but that couldn’t be it.
He kept thinking; Homeless person, homeless person. You are a homeless person. A song from Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ came to him, the one where one of the South African groups kept singing, Homeless; homeless, Da da da, da da da da da da … something like, Midnight come, and then you wanna go home. Or maybe it was a Zulu phrase. Or maybe, as he seemed to hear now: Homeless; homeless; he go down to find another home.
Something like that. He came to the intersection at the Bethesda Metro stop, and suddenly it occurred to him why he might be there. Of course – this was where he had met the woman in the elevator. They had gotten stuck together coming up from the Metro; alone together underground, minute after minute, until after a long talk they had started kissing, much to Frank’s surprise. And then when the repair team had arrived and they were let out, the woman had disappeared without Frank learning anything about her, even her name. It made his heart pound just to remember it. Up there on the sidewalk to the right, beyond the red light – there stood the very elevator box they had emerged from. And then she had appeared to him again, on a boat in the Potomac during the height of the great flood. He had called her boat on his cell phone, and she had answered, had said, ‘I’ll call. I don’t know when.’
The red light turned green. She had not called and yet here he was, driving back to where they had met as if he might catch sight of her. Maybe he had even been thinking that if he found her, he would have a place to stay.
That was silly; an example of magical thinking at its most unrealistic. And he had to admit that in the past couple of weeks he had been looking for apartments in this area. So it was not just an isolated impulse, but a pattern of behavior.
Just past the intersection he turned into the Hyatt driveway. A valet approached and Frank said, ‘Do you know if there are any rooms available here?’
‘Not if you don’t got a reservation.’
Frank hurried into the lobby to check anyway. A receptionist shook her head: no vacancies. She wasn’t aware of the situation at any other hotel. The ones in their chain were full all over the metropolitan area.
Frank got back in his car and drove onto Wisconsin heading south, peering at the elevator kiosk when he passed it. She had given a fake name on the Metro forms they had been asked to fill out. She would not be there now.
Down Wisconsin, past the Quibler’s house a couple of blocks over to the right. That was what had brought him to this part of town, on the night he and the woman got stuck in the elevator. Anna Quibler, one of his colleagues at NSF, had hosted a party for the Khembali ambassador, who had given a lecture at NSF earlier that day. A nice party. An excess of reason is itself a form of madness, the old ambassador had said to Frank. Frank was still pondering what that meant, and if it were true, how he might act on it.
But he couldn’t visit Anna and her family now. Showing up unannounced, with no place to go – it would have been pitiful.
He drove on. Homeless, homeless – he go down to find another home.
Chevy Chase looked relatively untouched by the flood. There was a giant hotel above Dupont Circle, the Hilton; he drove down Wisconsin and Massachusetts and turned up Florida to it, already feeling like he was wasting his time. There would be no rooms available.
There weren’t. ‘Homeless, homeless. Midnight come, and blah blah blah blah blahhhh.’
He drove up Connecticut Avenue, completely without a plan. Near the entrance to the National Zoo damage from the flood suddenly became obvious, in the form of a mud-based slurry of trash and branches covering the sidewalks and staining the storefronts. Just north of the zoo, traffic stopped to allow the passage of a backhoe. Street repairs by night, in the usual way. Harsh blue spotlights glared on a scene like something out of Soviet cinema, giant machines dwarfing a cityscape.
Impatiently Frank turned right onto a side street. He found an empty parking spot on one of the residential streets east of Connecticut, parked in it.
He got out and walked back to the clean-up scene. It was still about 90 degrees out, and tropically humid. A strong smell of mud and rotting vegetation evoked the tropics, or Atlantis after the flood. Yes, he was feeling a bit apocalyptic. He was in the end time of something, there was no denying it. Home-less; home-less.
A Spanish restaurant caught his eye. He went over to look at the menu in the window. Tapas. He went in, sat down and ordered. Excellent food, as always. D.C. could almost always be relied on for that. Surely it must be the great restaurant city of the world.
He finished his meal, left the restaurant and wandered the streets, feeling better. He had been hungry before, and had mistaken that for anxiety. Things were not so bad.
He passed his car but walked on east toward Rock Creek Park, remembering the article in the Post. A return to wilderness.
At Broad Branch Road Frank came to the park’s boundary. There was no one visible in any direction. It was dark under the trees on the other side of the road; the yellow streetlights behind him illuminated nothing beyond the first wall of leaves.
He crossed the street and walked into the forest.
The flood’s vegetable stench was strong. Frank proceeded slowly; if there had been any trail here before it was gone now, replaced by windrows of branches and trash, and an uneven deposition of mud. The rootballs of toppled trees splayed up dimly, and snags caught at his feet. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he came to feel that everything was very slightly illuminated, mostly no doubt by the luminous city cloud that chinked every gap in the black canopy.
He heard a rustle, then a voice. Without thought he slipped behind a large tree and froze there, heart pounding.
Two voices were arguing, one of them drunk.
‘Why you buy this shit?’
‘Hey you never buy anything. You need to give some, man.’
The two passed by and continued down the slope to the east, their voices rasping through the trees. Home-less, home-less. Their voices had reminded Frank of the scruffy guys in fatigues who hung out around Dupont Circle.
Frank didn’t want to deal with any such people. He was annoyed; he wanted to be out in a pure wilderness, empty in the way his mountains out west were empty. Instead, harsh laughter nicotined through the trees like hatchet strokes. ‘Ha ha ha harrrrrr.’ There went the neighborhood.
He slipped off in a different direction, down through windrows of detritus, then over hardened mud between trees. Branches clicked damply underfoot. It got steeper than he thought it would, and he stepped sideways to keep from slipping.
Then he heard another sound, quieter than the voices. A soft rustle and a creak, then a faint crack from the forest below and ahead. Something moving.
Frank froze. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up. Whatever it was, it sounded big. The article in the Post had mentioned that many of the animals from the National Zoo had not yet been recaptured. All had been let loose just before the zoo was inundated, to give them a chance of surviving. Some had drowned anyway; most had been recovered afterward; but not all. Frank couldn’t remember if any species in particular had been named in the article as being still at large. It was a big park of course. Possibly a jaguar had been mentioned.
He tried to meld into the tree he was leaning against.
Whatever it was below him snapped a branch just a few trees away. It sniffed; almost a snort. It was big, no doubt about it.
Frank could no longer hold his breath, but he found that if he let his mouth hang open, he could breathe without a sound. The tock of his heartbeat in the soft membrane at the back of his throat must surely be more a feeling than a sound. Most animals relied on scent anyway, and there was nothing he could do about his scent. A thought that could reduce one’s muscles to jelly.
The creature had paused. It huffed. A musky odor that wafted by was almost like the smell of the flood detritus. His heart tocked like Captain Hook’s alarm clock.
A slow scrape, as of shoulder against bark. Another branch click. A distant car horn. The smell now resembled damp fur. Another crunch of leaf and twig, farther down the slope.
When he heard nothing more, and felt that he was alone again, he beat a retreat uphill and west, back to the streets of the city. It was frustrating, because now he was intrigued, and wanted to explore the park further. But he didn’t want to end up one of those urban fools who ignored the reality of wild animals and then got chomped. Whatever that had been down there, it was big. Best to be prudent, and return another time.
After the gloom of the park, all Connecticut seemed as garishly illuminated as the work site down the street. Walking back to his car, Frank thought that the neighborhood resembled one of the more handsome Victorian districts of San Francisco. It was late now, the night finally cooling off. He could drive all night and never find a room.
He stood before his car. The Honda’s passenger seat tilted back like a little recliner. The nearest streetlight was down at the corner.
He opened the passenger door, moved the seat all the way back, lowered it, slipped in and sat down. He closed the door, lay back, stretched out. After a while he turned on his side and fell into an uneasy sleep.
For an hour or two. Then passing footsteps woke him. Anyone could see him if they looked. They might tap the window to see if he was okay. He would have to claim to be a visiting reporter, unable to find a room – very close to the truth, like all the best lies. He could claim to be anyone really. Out here he was not bound to his real story.
He lay awake, uncomfortable in the seat, pretty sure he would not be able to fall back asleep; then he was lightly under, dreaming about the woman in the elevator. A part of his mind became aware that this was unusual, and he fought to stay submerged despite that realization. He was speaking to her about something urgent. Her face was so clear, it had imprinted so vividly: passionate and amused in the elevator, grave and distant on the boat in the flood. He wasn’t sure he liked what she was telling him. Just call me, he insisted. Give me that call and we can work it out.
Then the noise of a distant siren hauled him up, sweaty and unhappy. He lay there a while longer, thinking about the woman’s face. Once in high school he had made out with a girl in a little car like this one, in which the laid-back seat had allowed them somehow to lie on each other. He wanted her. He wanted to find her. From the boat she had said she would call. I don’t know how long, she had said. Maybe that meant long. He would just have to wait. Unless he could figure out some new way to hunt for her.
The sky was lightening. Now he definitely wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep. With a groan he heaved himself up, got out of the car.
He stood on the sidewalk, feeling wasted. The sky was a velvet gray, seeming darker than it had in the middle of the night. The air was cool. He walked east again, back into the park.
Dew polished the thick gray foliage. In the diffuse low light the wet leaves looked like a forest of wax. Frank slowed down. He saw what looked like a trail, perhaps an animal trail. There were lots of deer in the park, the article had said. He could hear the sound of Rock Creek, a burbling that as he descended overwhelmed the city sounds, the perpetual grumble of trucking. The sky was lightening fast, and what had seemed to him cloud cover was revealed as a clear pale sky. Dim greens began to flush the grays. The air was still cool.
It turned out that in this area Rock Creek ran at the bottom of a fairly steep ravine, and the flood had torn the sidewalls away in places, as he saw when he came to a sudden drop-off. Below him, bare sandstone extruded roots like ripped wiring. He circled above the drop, dodging between low trees.
From a little clearing he could suddenly see downstream. The flood in spate had torn the little canyon clear. Everything that had been down there before – Beach Road, the small bridges and buildings, the ranger station, the picnic areas – all of it was gone, leaving a raw zone of bare sandstone, flat mud, thrashed grass, downed timber, and stubborn trees that were either clinging to life or dead in place. Many trees had been knocked over and yet held on by a few roots, forming living snags piled high with mud and trash. A larger snag downstream looked like a giant beaver dam, creating a dirt-brown pond.
The sky stood big and blue overhead, a tall dome that seemed to rise as the day lightened. Muddy Rock Creek burbled noisily down its course, spilling from one foamy brown stretch to the next.
At the far edge of the pond a heron strode slowly, its knees bending backward. Long body, long legs, long neck, long head, long beak. A great blue heron, Frank guessed, though this one’s dark gray feathers looked more green than blue. A kind of dinosaur. And indeed nothing could have looked more pterodactylic. Two hundred million years.
Sunlight blazed green at the tops of the trees across the ravine. Frank and the heron stood attentively, listening to unseen smaller birds whose wild twittering now filled the air. The heron’s head cocked to one side. For a time everything was as still as bronze.
Then beyond the twittering came a different sound, fluid and clear, rising like a siren, like a hook in the flesh:
Oooooooooooooooooop!
National Science Foundation, Arlington Virginia, basement parking lot, seven AM. A primate sitting in his car, thinking things over. As one of the editors of The Journal of Sociobiology Frank was very much aware of the origins of their species. The third chimp, as Diamond had put it. Now he thought: chimps sleep outdoors. Bonobos sleep outdoors.
Housing was ultimately an ergonomic problem. What did he really need? His belongings were here in the car, or upstairs in his office, or in boxes at UCSD, or in storage units in Encinitas, California, or down the road in Arlington, Virginia. The fact that stuff was in storage showed how much it really mattered. By and large he was free of worldly things. At age forty-three he no longer needed them. That felt a little strange, actually, but not necessarily bad. Did it feel good? It was hard to tell. It simply felt strange.
He got out of his car and took the elevator to the third floor, where there was a little exercise room, with a men’s room off its entryway that included showers. In his shoulder bag he carried his laptop, his cell phone, his bathroom kit, and a change of clothes. The three shower stalls stood behind white curtains, near an area with benches and lockers. Beyond it extended the room containing toilets, urinals, and a counter of sinks under a long mirror.
Frank knew the place, having showered and changed in it many times after runs at lunch with Edgardo and Kenzo and Bob and the others. Now he surveyed it with a new regard. It was as he remembered: an adequate bathroom, public but serviceable.
He undressed and got in one of the showers. A flood of hot water, almost industrial in quantity, washed away some of the stiffness of his uncomfortable night. Of course no one would want to be seen showering there every day. Not that anyone was watching, but some of the morning exercisers would eventually notice.
A membership in some nearby exercise club would provide an alternative bathroom.
What else did one need?
Somewhere to sleep, of course. The Honda would not suffice. If he had a van, and an exercise club membership, and this locker room, and his office upstairs, and the men’s rooms up there … As for food, the city had a million restaurants.
What else?
Nothing he could think of. Many people more or less lived in this building, all the NSF hardcores who spent sixty or seventy hours a week here, ate their meals at their desks or in the neighborhood restaurants, only went home to sleep – and these were people with families, with kids, homes, pets, partners!
In a crowd like that it would be hard to stick out.
He got out of the shower, dried off (a stack of fresh white towels was there at hand), shaved, dressed.
He glanced in the mirror over the sink, feeling a bit shy. He didn’t look at himself in mirrors anymore, never met his eye when shaving, stayed focused on the skin under the blade. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because he did not resemble his conception of himself, which was vaguely scientific and serious, say Darwinesque; and yet there in the glass getting shaved was always the same old sun-fried jock.
But this time he looked. To his surprise he saw that he looked normal – that was to say, the same as always. Normative. No one would be able to guess by his appearance that he was sleep-deprived, that he had been thinking some pretty abnormal thoughts, or, crucially, that he had spent the previous night in his car because he no longer had a home.
‘Hmm,’ he told his reflection.
He took the elevator up to the tenth floor, still thinking it over. He stood in the doorway of his new office, evaluating the place by these new inhabitory criteria. It was a true room, rather than a carrel in a larger space, so it had a door he could close. It boasted one of the big inner windows looking into the building’s central atrium, giving him a direct view of the big colored mobile that filled the atrium’s upper half.
This view was unfortunate, actually. He didn’t want to look at that mobile, for not too long ago he had found himself hanging upside down from it, in the middle of the night, working desperately to extricate himself from an ill-conceived and poorly executed break-and-enter job. He had been trying and failing to recover a poorly-worded resignation letter he had left for Diane Chang, the NSF director. It was an incident he would really rather forget.
But there the mobile hung, at the new angle which Frank had given to it and which no one had noticed, perhaps a reminder to – to what? To try not to do stupid things. To think things through before attempting them. But he always tried to do that, so the reminder was unnecessary. Really, the mobile outside his window was a disadvantage. But drapes could be installed.
There was room for a short couch against one wall, if he moved the bookcase there to the opposite corner. It would then be like a kind of living room, with the computer as entertainment center. There was an ordinary men’s room around the corner, a coffee nook down the hall, the showers downstairs. All the necessities. As Sucandra had remarked, at dinner once at the Quiblers’, tasting spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon: Ahhhh – what now is lacking?
Same answer: Nothing.
It had to be admitted that it made him uneasy to be contemplating this idea. Unsettled. It was deranged, in the literal sense of being outside the range. Typically people did not choose to live without a home. No home to go home to; it was perhaps a little crazy.
But in some obscure way, that aspect pleased him too. It was not crazy in the way that breaking into the building through the skylight had been crazy; but it shared that act’s commitment to an idea. And was it any crazier than handing well over half of your monthly take-home income to pay for seriously crappy lodging?
Nomadic existence. Life outdoors. So often he had thought about, read about, and written about the biological imperatives in human behavior – about their primate nature, and the evolutionary history that had led to humanity’s paleolithic lifestyle, which was the suite of behaviors that had caused their brains to balloon as rapidly as they had; and about the residual power of all that in modern life. And all the while, through all that thinking, reading, and writing, he had been sitting at a desk. Living like every other professional worker in America, a brain in a bottle, working with his fingertips or his voice or simply his thoughts alone, distracted sometimes by daydreams about the brief bursts of weekend activity that would get him back into his body again.
That was what was crazy, living like that when he held the beliefs he did.
Now he was considering acting in accordance with his beliefs. Something else he had heard the Khembalis say at the Quiblers’, this time Drepung: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling.
He wanted these to be true feelings. Everything had changed for him on that day he had gone to the Khembali ambassador’s talk, and then run into the woman in the elevator, and afterward talked to Drepung at the Quiblers’ party, and then, yes, broken into the NSF building and tried to recover his resignation. Everything had changed! Or so it had felt; so it felt still. But for it to be a true feeling, he had to act on it.
Meaning also, as part of all these new behaviors, that he had to meet with Diane Chang, and work with her on coordinating NSF’s response to the climate situation that was implicated in the great flood and many other things.
This would be awkward. His letter of resignation, which Diane had never directly acknowledged receiving, was now an acute embarrassment to him. It had been an irrational attempt to burn his bridges, and by all rights he should now be back in San Diego with nothing but the stench of smoke behind him. Instead, Diane appeared to have read the letter and then ignored it, or rather, considered how to use it to play him like a fish, and reel him back into NSF for another year of service. Which she had done very skillfully.
So now he found that he had to stifle a certain amount of resentment as he went up to see her. He had to meet her secretary Laveta’s steely eye without flinching; pretend, as the impassive black woman waved him in, that all was normal. No way of telling how much she knew about his situation.
Diane sat behind her desk, talking on the phone. She gestured for him to sit down. Graceful hands. Short, Chinese-American, good-looking in an exotic way, businesslike but friendly. A subtly amused expression on her face when she listened to people, as if pleased to hear their news.
As now, with Frank. Although it could be amusement at his resignation letter, and the way she had jiu-jitsued him into staying at NSF. So hard to tell with Diane; and her manner, though friendly, did not invite personal conversation.
‘You’re into your new office?’ she asked.
‘My stuff is, anyway. It’ll take a while to sort out.’
‘Sure. Like everything else these days! What a mess it all is. I have Kenzo and some of his group coming this morning to tell us more about the Gulf Stream.’
‘Good.’
Kenzo and a couple of his colleagues in climate duly appeared. They exchanged hellos, got out laptops, and Kenzo started working the Power Point on Diane’s wall screen.
All the data, Kenzo explained, indicated stalls in what he called the ‘thermohaline circulation.’ At the north ends of the Gulf Stream, where the water on the surface normally cooled and sank to the floor of the Atlantic before heading back south, a particularly fresh layer on the surface had stalled the downwelling. With nowhere to go, the water in the current farther south had slowed to a halt.
What was more, Kenzo said, just such a stall in the thermohaline circulation had been identified as the primary cause of the abrupt climate change that paleoclimatologists had named the Younger Dryas, a bitter little ice age that had begun about eleven thousand years before the present, and lasted for a few thousand years. The hypothesis was that the Gulf Stream’s shutdown, after floods of fresh water coming off the melting ice cap over North America, had meant immediately colder temperatures in Europe and the eastern half of North America. This accounted for the almost unbelievably quick beginning of the Younger Dryas, which analysis of the Greenland ice cores revealed had happened in only three years. Three years, for a major global shift from the worldwide pattern that climatologists called warm-wet, to the worldwide pattern called cool-dry-windy. It was such a radical notion that it had forced climatologists to acknowledge that there must be nonlinear tipping points in the global climate, leading to general acceptance of what was really a new concept in climatology: abrupt climate change.
‘What caused the stall again?’ Diane said.
Kenzo clicked to the next slide, an image of the Earth portraying the immense ice cap that had covered much of the northern hemisphere throughout the last ice age. The end of that one had arrived slowly, in the old-fashioned linear way, melting the top of the ice cap and creating giant lakes that rested on the remaining ice. These lakes had been held in place by ice dams that were themselves melting, and when the dams had at last given way, extraordinarily large floods of fresh water had rushed down into the ocean, emptying volumes as large as the Great Lakes in a matter of weeks. Signs left on the landscape indicated this had happened down the watersheds of the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Mississippi, and out west, a lake covering most of Montana had drained down the course of the Columbia River several times, leaving an area in Washington called the scablands which gave eloquent testimony to the power of these floods to tear into the bedrock. Presumably the same thing had happened on the East Coast, but the signs had mostly been submerged by rising sea levels or the great eastern forest, so that they were only now being discerned.
Frank, looking at the map on the screen, thought of how Rock Creek had looked that morning at dawn. Theirs had been a very tiny flood relative to the ones Kenzo was describing, and yet the watershed was devastated.
So, Kenzo continued, fresh water, dumped into the North Atlantic all at once, appeared to block the thermohaline cycle. And nowadays, for the last several years, the Arctic Ocean’s winter sea ice had been breaking up into great fleets of icebergs, which then sailed south on currents until they encountered the Gulf Stream’s warm water, where they melted. The melting zones for these icebergs, as a map on the next slide made clear, were just above the northern ends of the Gulf Stream, the so-called downwelling areas. Meanwhile the Greenland ice cap and glaciers were also melting much faster than had been normal, and running off both sides of that great island.
‘How much fresh water in all that?’ Diane asked.
Kenzo shrugged. ‘The Arctic is about ten million square kilometers. The sea ice lately is about five meters thick. Not all of that drifts into the Atlantic, of course. There was a paper that estimated that about twenty thousand cubic kilometers of fresh water had diluted the Arctic over the past thirty years, but it was plus or minus five thousand cubic kilometers.’
‘Let’s get better parameters on that figure, if we can,’ Diane said.
‘Sure.’
They stared at the final slide. The implications tended to stall on the surface of the mind, Frank thought, like the water in the north Atlantic, refusing to gyre down. The whole world, ensconced in a global climate mode called warm and wet, and getting warmer and wetter because of global warming caused by anthropogenically released greenhouse gases, could switch to a global pattern that was cold, dry, and windy. And the last time it happened, it had taken three years. Hard to believe; but the Greenland ice core data were very clear, and the rest of the case equally persuasive – one might even say, in science’s distinctive vocabulary of levels of certainty, compelling.
When Kenzo and his team had left, Diane turned to Frank. ‘What do you think?’
‘It looks serious. It may get people to take action.’
‘Except by now it may be too late.’
‘Yes.’
They considered that in silence for a few moments, and then Diane said, ‘Let’s talk about your second year here, how to organize it to get the most out of you.’
That was a pretty blunt way to put it, given Diane’s manipulations, but Frank was careful not to express any resentment. ‘Sure,’ he said. It had been documented that if you forced your face to take on pleasant expressions, your mood tended helplessly to follow. So, small smile of acceptance; pull chair up to desk.
They worked their way down a list Diane had made identifying areas where NSF might do something to deal with the impacts of abrupt climate change. As they did Frank saw that Diane was well ahead of him in thinking about these matters, which he found a little surprising, although of course it made sense; otherwise why would she have wanted him to stay another year? His letter would not have been what brought her the news of NSF’s ineffectiveness in dealing with a crisis situation.
She spoke very quickly. Slightly fog-minded, Frank struggled to keep up, looking at her more closely than ever before. Of course every face was inscrutable in the end. Diane’s was dramatically planed, cheekbones, forehead, and jaw all distinct and somehow angled to each other. Formal; formidable. Asian dragon lady, yes. She drew the eye. She was about ten years Frank’s senior, he had gathered; a widow, he had heard; had been NSF head for a long time, Frank wasn’t sure how long. Famous for her incredibly long work days. They used to call people like her workaholics before everyone got up to speed and the concept had gone away. Once Edgardo had said of Diane, she makes Anna look like a slacker, and Frank had shuddered, because Anna was a veritable maniac for work. Anything beyond that pretty much had to be insane. And this was who he was going to be working for.
Well, fine. He had not stayed in D.C. to fool around. He too wanted to work long hours. And now it was clear he would have Diane’s ear and her support, therefore the cooperation of anyone needed at NSF; things would therefore get done. That was the only thing that would make staying in Washington bearable.
He focused on her list:
• Coordinate already existing federal programs
• Establish new institutes and programs where necessary
• Work with Sophie Harper, NSF’s congressional liaison officer, to contact and educate all the relevant Congressional committees and staffs, and help craft appropriate legislation
• Work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Environmental Program, its Millennial Project, and other international efforts
• Identify, evaluate and rank all potential climate mitigation possibilities: clean energy, carbon sequestration, etc.
This last item, to Frank, would create the real Things To Do list.
‘We’ll have to go to New York and talk to people about that stuff,’ Diane said.
‘Yes.’
It would be interesting to watch her there. Asian martial arts were often about turning one’s opponents’ force against them. Certainly she had floored Frank that way. Maybe the rest of the world would follow.
But reviewing the list, he felt a surge of impatience. He tried to express this to Diane politely: he didn’t want to spend his extra year starting studies. He wanted to find where small applications of money and effort could trigger larger actions. He wanted to do things. If the weather was going to heat up, he wanted to cool it. If vice versa, then vice versa. He wanted to identify a viable new energy generation system, he wanted to sequester billions of tons of carbon, he wanted to minimize human suffering and the loss of other species. He wanted impossible things! Quickly he scribbled a new list for their mutual inspection:
• direct climate mitigation
• carbon sequestration (bio, physical)
• water cycle interventions
• clean renewable energy (biomass, solar, wave, tide, wind)
• political action
• a new paradigm (permaculture)
Diane read the list. Her expression of subtle amusement became a full smile, perfectly scrutable.
‘You think big.’
‘Well, it’s a big situation. I mean even the Gulf Stream stall is only a proximate cause. The ultimate causes have to do with the whole situation. Carbon, consumption, population, technology, all that. We’ll have to try to take all that on if we’re going to actually do something.’
‘There are other agencies working on these things. In fact, lots of this isn’t really our purview.’
‘Yes, well, but – we are the National Science Foundation,’ emphasizing the words. ‘It isn’t really clear yet just how big a purview such an organization should have. Given the importance of science in this world, you could argue that it should be pretty much everything. But for sure it should be the place to coordinate the scientific effort. Beyond that, who knows? It’s a new situation.’
‘True,’ she said, still smiling at him in her amused way. ‘Well, okay! Let’s go get some lunch and talk about it.’
Frank tried to conceal his surprise. ‘Sure.’
The hotel above the Ballston Metro offered a buffet lunch that was so fancy that it redefined the concept. The restaurant was cool and quiet, decorated in the finest American Hotel Anonymous. Diane appeared to know it well, and to have a hidden corner table reserved. She filled a big plate with salad and some strips of seared flank steak, and took no bread. Iced tea without sugar. She was dressed in a businesslike skirt and heavy silk blouse, and Frank saw as he followed her that it was all perfectly tailored and fitted, and looked expensive. She moved gracefully, looked strong. Usually Frank’s eye was not attracted to short women, but when it happened it was a matter of proportion, a kind of regal bearing. She wore flat shoes, and did not seem attentive to herself. Probably, judging by her food, thought of herself as overweight. But she looked good.
The irrepressible sociobiologist that was always theorizing inside Frank wondered if he was experiencing some bias here, given that she was a powerful alpha female, and his boss. Perhaps all alpha females were somehow physically impressive, and this part of their alpha-ness; it was generally true of males.
They sat, ate, spoke of other things. Frank asked about her kids.
‘Grown up and moved out. It’s easier now.’ She spoke offhandedly, as if talking about a matter that did not really concern her. ‘How could it not be.’
‘For a while it must have been busy.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Where were you before NSF?’
‘University of Washington. Biophysics. Then I got into administration there, then at triple A S, then NIH. Now here.’ She shrugged, as if to admit that she might have gone down a wrong path somewhere. ‘What about you? What brought you to NSF?’
Well, I gambled with equity that wasn’t entirely mine, lost it, went through a break-up, needed to get away …
It wasn’t a story he wanted to tell. Maybe no one’s story could really be told. She had not mentioned her late husband, for instance. She would understand if he only spoke of his scientific reasons for coming to NSF: new work in bio-algorithms, needed a wider perspective to see what was out there, a year visiting NSF good for that – and so on.
She nodded, watching him with that amused expression, as if to say, I know this is only part of the story but it’s still interesting. He liked that. No wonder she had risen so high. Alpha females pursued different strategies than alpha males to achieve their goals; their alpha-ness derived from different social qualities.
‘What about your living situation?’ she asked. ‘Were you able to stay in the place you had?’
Startled, Frank said, ‘No. I was renting from a State Department guy who came back.’
‘So you managed to find another place?’
‘Yes … For the moment I’m in a temporary place, and I’ve got some leads for a permanent one.’
‘That’s good. It must be tough right now, with the flood.’
‘That’s for sure. It’s gotten very expensive.’
‘I bet. Let me know if we can help with that.’
‘Thanks, I will.’
He wondered what she meant, but did not want to ask. ‘One thing I’m looking into is joining an exercise club around here, and Anna mentioned that you went to one?’
‘Yes, I go to the Optimodal.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Sure, it’s okay. It’s not too expensive, and it has all the usual stuff. And it’s not just kids showing off. Most days I just get on a treadmill and go.’ She laughed. ‘Like a rat on a wheel.’
Just like at work, Frank didn’t say.
‘Actually I’ve been trying more of the machines,’ she added. ‘It’s fun.’
Frank got the address from her, and they went back to the serving area for pie and ice cream (her portion small), and talked a bit more about work. She never made even the slightest hint of reference to his letter of resignation. That was strange enough to disturb his sense of being in a normal professional relationship. It was as if she were in some way holding it over him.
Then, walking in the covered walkway above the street to the NSF building, she said, ‘Let’s set up a regular meeting between us for every two weeks, and add more if you need to. I want to be kept up on what you’re thinking.’
Quickly he glanced down at her. She kept looking at the glass doors they were approaching.
‘That’s the best way to avoid any misunderstandings,’ she went on, still not looking at him. Then, as they reached the doors to their building, she said, ‘I want something to come of this.’
‘Me too,’ he assured her. ‘Believe me.’
They approached the security desk. ‘So what will you do first?’ she asked, as if something had been settled between them.
‘To tell the truth, I think I’ll go see about joining that health club.’
She grinned. ‘Good idea. I’ll see you there sometimes.’
He nodded. ‘And, as far as the working committee, I’ll start making calls and setting it up. I’d like to get Edgardo on it too, if you think that would be okay.’
She laughed. ‘If you can talk him into it.’
So. Frank returned to his office, collecting his thoughts. A workman was there installing a power strip on the newly exposed wall behind his desk, and he waited patiently until the man left. He sat at the desk, swiveled and looked out the window at the mobile in the atrium.
He had spent the night in his car and then lunched with the director of the National Science Foundation, and no one was the wiser. He did feel a little spacy. But when appearances were maintained, no one could tell. Nothing obvious gave it away. One retained a certain privacy.
Remembering a resolution he had made that morning, he picked up the phone and called the National Zoo.
‘Hi, I’m calling to ask about zoo animals that might still be at large?’
‘Sure, let me pass you to Nancy.’
Nancy came on and said hi in a friendly voice, and Frank told her about hearing what seemed like a big animal, near the edge of the park at night. ‘Do you have a list of zoo animals still on the loose?’
‘Sure, it’s on our website. Do you want to join our group?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s a committee of the volunteer group, FONZ? Friends of the National Zoo. You can join that, it’s called the Feral Observation Group.’
‘The FOG?’
‘Yes. We’re all in the FOG now, right?’
‘Yes.’
She gave him the website address, and he checked it out. It turned out to be a good one. Some 1500 Fonzies already. There was a page devoted to the Khembalis’ swimming tigers, and on the FOG page, a list of the animals that had been spotted, as well as a separate list for animals missing since the flood and not yet seen. There was a jaguar on this list. And gibbons had been seen, eight of them, white-cheeked gibbons, along with three siamangs. Almost always in Rock Creek Park.
‘Hmmm.’ Frank recalled the cry he had heard at dawn, pursued the creatures through the web pages. Gibbons and siamangs both hooted in a regular dawn chorus; siamangs were even louder than gibbons, being larger. Could be heard six miles rather than one.
It looked like being in FOG might confer permission to go into Rock Creek Park. You couldn’t observe animals in a park you were forbidden to enter. He called Nancy back. ‘Do FOG members get to go into Rock Creek Park?’
‘Some do. We usually go in groups, but we have some individual permits you can check out.’
‘Cool. Tell me how I do that.’
He left the building and walked down Wilson and up a side street, to the Optimodal Health Club. Diane had said it was within easy walking distance, and it was. That was good; and the place looked okay. Actually he had always preferred getting his ‘exercise’ outdoors, by doing something challenging. Up until now he had felt that clubs like these were mostly just another way to commodify leisure time, in this case changing things people used to do outdoors, for free, into things they paid to do inside. Silly as such.
But if you needed to rent a bathroom, they were great.
So he did his best to remain expressionless (resulting in a visage unusually grim) while he gave the young woman at the desk a credit card, and signed the forms. Full membership, no. Personal trainer ready to take over his thinking about his body but without incurring any legal liability, no way. He did pay extra for a permanent locker in which to store some of his stuff. Another bathroom kit there, another change of clothes; it would all come in useful.
He followed his guide around the rooms of the place, keeping his expressionless expression firmly in place. By the time he was done, the poor girl looked thoroughly unsettled.
Back at NSF he went into the basement to his Honda.
A great little car. But now it did not serve the purpose. He drove west on Wilson for a long time, until he came to the Honda/Ford/Lexus dealer where he had leased this car a year before. In this one aspect of the fiasco that was remaining in D.C., his timing was good; he needed to re-up for another year, and the eager salesman handling him was happy to hear that this time he wanted to lease an Odyssey van. One of the best vans on the road, as the man told him as they walked out to view one. Also one of the smallest, Frank didn’t say.
Dull silver, the most anonymous color around, like a cloak of invisibility. Rear seat removal, yes; therefore room in back for his single mattress, now in storage. Tinted windows all around the back, creating a pretty high degree of privacy. It was almost as good as the VW van he had lived in for a couple of Yosemite summers, parked in the Camp Four parking lot enjoying the stove and refrigerator and pop-top in his tiny motor home. Culturally the notion of small vehicle as home had crashed since then, having been based on a beat/hippie idea of frugality that had lost out to the usual American excess, to the point of being made illegal by a Congress bought by the auto industry. No stoves allowed in little vans, of course! Had to house them in giant Rvs.
But this Odyssey would serve the purpose. Frank skimmed the lease terms, signed the forms. He saw that he might need to rent a post office box. But maybe the NSF address would do.
Walking back out to take possession of his new bedroom, he and the salesman passed a line of parked SUV – tall fat station wagons, in effect, called Expedition or Explorer, absurdities for the generations to come to shake their heads at in the way they once marveled at the finned cars of the fifties. ‘Do people still buy these?’ Frank asked despite himself.
‘Sure, what do you mean? Although now you mention it, there is some surplus here at the end of the year.’ It was May. ‘Long story short, gas is getting too expensive. I drive one of these,’ tapping a Lincoln Navigator. ‘They’re great. They’ve got a couple of TVs in the back.’
But they’re stupid, Frank didn’t say. In prisoner’s dilemma terms, they were always-defect. They were America saying Fuck Off to the rest of the world. Deliberate waste, in a kind of ritual desecration. Not just denial but defiance, a Gotterdammerung gesture that said: If we’re going down we’re going to take the whole world with us. And the roads were full of them. And the Gulf Stream had stopped.
‘Amazing,’ Frank said.
His drove his new Odyssey directly to the storage place in Arlington where he had rented a unit. He liked the feel of the van; it drove like a car. In front of his storage unit he took out its back seats, put them in the oversized metal-and-concrete closet, less than half full with his stuff; took his single mattress out and laid it in the back of the van. Perfect fit. He could use the same sheets and pillows he had been using in his apartment.
‘Home – less, home – less. Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ho ho ho.’
He could sort through the rest of his stored stuff later on. Possibly very little of it would ever come out of boxes again.
He locked up and drove to the Beltway, around in the jam to Wisconsin Avenue, down into the city. The newly ritualized pass by the elevator kiosk at Bethesda. Now he could have dropped in on the Quiblers without feeling pitiful, even though in most respects his circumstances had not changed since the night before; but now he had a plan. And a van. And this time he didn’t want to stop. Over to Connecticut, down to the neighborhood north of the zoo, turn onto the same street he had the night before. He noted how the establishing of habits was part of the homing instinct.
Most streets in this neighborhood were permit parking by day and open parking by night, except for the one night a week they were cleaned. Once parked, the van became perfectly nondescript. Equidistant from two driveways; streetlight near but not too near. He would learn the full drill only by practicing it, but this street looked to be a good one.
Out and up Connecticut. Edward Hopper tableaux, end of the day. The streetwork waiting on the sidewalks for rush hour to be over and the night work to begin. It was mostly retail on this part of Connecticut, with upscale apartments and offices behind, then the residential neighborhood, no doubt extremely expensive even though the houses were not big. Like anywhere else in D.C., there were restaurants from all over the world. It wasn’t just that one could get Ethiopian or Azeri, but that there would be choices: Hari food from southern Ethiopia, or Sudanese style from the north? Good, bad or superb Lebanese?
Having grown up in southern California, Frank could never get used to this array. These days he was fondest of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines, and this area of Northwest was rich in both, so that he had to think about which one he wanted, and whether to eat in or do take-out. Eating alone in a restaurant he would have to have something to read. Funny how reading in a restaurant was okay, while watching a laptop or talking on a cell phone was not. Actually, judging by the number of laptops visible in the taverna at the corner of Connecticut and Brandywine, that custom had already changed. Maybe they were reading from their laptops. That might be okay. He would have to try it and see how it felt.
He decided to do take-out. It was dinner time but there was still lots of light left to the day; he could take a meal out into the park and enjoy the sunset. He walked on Connecticut until he came on a Greek restaurant that would put dolmades and calamari in paper boxes, with a dill yogurt sauce in a tiny plastic container. Too bad about the ouzo and retsina, only sold in the restaurant; he liked those tastes. He ordered an ouzo to drink while waiting for his food, downing it before the ice cubes even got a chance to turn it milky.
Back on the street. The taste of licorice enveloped him like a key signature, black and sweet. Steamy dusk of spring, hazed with blossom dust. Sweatslipping past two women; something in their sudden shared laughter set him to thinking about his woman from the elevator. Would she call? And if so, when? And what would she say, and what would he say? A licorish mood, an anticipation of lust, like a wolf whistle in his mind. Vegetable smell of the flood. The two women had been so beautiful. Washington was like that.
The food in his paper sack was making him hungry, so he turned east and walked into Rock Creek Park, following a path that eventually brought him to a pair of picnic tables, bunched at one end of a small bedraggled lawn. A stone fireplace like a little charcoal oven anchored the ensemble. The muddy grass was uncut. Birch and sycamore trees overhung the area. There had been lots of picnic areas in the park, but most had been located down near the creek and so presumably had been washed away. This one was set higher, in a little hollow next to Ross Drive. All of them, Frank recalled, used to be marked by big signs saying CLOSED AT DUSK. Nothing like that remained now. He sat at one of the tables, opened up his food.
He was about halfway through the calamari when several men tromped into the glade and sat at the other table or stood before the stone fireplace, bringing with them a heavy waft of stale sweat, smoke, and beer. Worn jackets, plastic bags: homeless guys.
Two of them pulled beer cans out of a paper grocery bag. A grizzled one in fatigues saluted Frank with a can. ‘Hey man.’
Frank nodded politely. ‘Evening.’
‘Want a beer?’
‘No thanks.’
‘What’s a matter?’
Frank shrugged. ‘Sure, why not.’
‘Yar. There ya go.’
Frank finished his calamari and drank the offered Pabst Blue Ribbon, watching the men settle around him. His benefactor and two of the others were dressed in the khaki camouflage fatigues that signified Vietnam Vet Down On Luck (Your Fault, Give Money). Sure enough, a cardboard sign with a long story scrawled in felt-tip on it protruded from one of their bags.
Next to the three vets, a slight man with a dark red beard and pony-tail sat on the table. The other three men were black, one of these a youth or even a boy. They sat down at Frank’s table. The youngster unpacked a box that contained a chess set, chessboard, and timer. The man who had offered Frank a beer came over and sat down across from the youth as he set the board. The pieces were cheap plastic, but the timer looked more expensive. The two started a game, the kid slapping the plunger on his side of the timer down after pauses averaging about fifteen seconds, while the vet usually depressed his with a slow touch, after a minute or more had passed, always declaring ‘Ah fuck.’
‘Want to play next?’ the boy asked Frank. ‘Bet you five dollars.’
‘I’m not good enough to play for money.’
‘Bet you that box of squid there.’
‘No way.’ Frank ate on while they continued. ‘You guys aren’t playing for money,’ he observed.
‘He already took all I got,’ the vet said. ‘Now I’m like pitching him batting practice. He’s dancing on my body, the little fucker.’
The boy shook his head. ‘You just ain’t paying attention.’
‘You wore me out, Chessman. You’re beating me when I’m down. You’re a fucking menace. I’m setting up my sneak attack.’
‘Checkmate.’
The other guys laughed.
Then three men ran into their little clearing. ‘Hi guys!’ they shouted as they hustled to the far end of the site.
‘What the hell?’ Frank said.
The big vet guffawed. ‘It’s the frisbee players!’
‘They’re always running,’ one of the other vets explained. He wore a VFW baseball cap and his face was dissolute and whiskery. He shouted to the runners: ‘Hey who’s winning!’
‘The wind!’ one of them replied.
‘Evening, gentlemen,’ another said. ‘Happy Thursday.’
‘Is that what it is?’
‘Hey who’s winning? Who’s winning?’
‘The wind is winning. We’re all winning.’
‘That’s what you say! I got my money on you now! Don’t you let me down now!’
The players faced a fairway of mostly open air to the north.
‘What’s your target?’ Frank called.
The tallest of them had blue eyes, gold-red dreadlocks, mostly gathered under a bandana, and a scraggly red-gold beard. He was the one who had greeted the homeless guys first. Now he paused and said to Frank, ‘The trashcan, down there by that light. Par four, little dogleg.’ He took a step and made his throw, a smooth uncoiling motion, and then the others threw and they were off into the dusk.
‘They run,’ the second vet explained.
‘Running frisbee golf?’
‘Yeah some people do it that way. Rolfing they call it, running golf. Not these guys though! They just run without no name for it. They don’t always use the regular targets either. There’s some baskets out here, they’re metal things with chains hanging from them. You got to hit the chains and the frisbees fall in a basket.’
‘Except they don’t,’ the first vet scoffed.
‘Yeah it’s a finicky sport. Like fucking golf, you know.’
Down the path Frank could see the runners picking up their frisbees and stopping for only a moment before throwing again.
‘How often do they come here?’
‘A lot!’
‘You can ask them, they’ll be back in a while. They run the course forward and back.’
They sat there, once or twice hearing the runners call out. Fifteen minutes later the men did indeed return, on the path they had left.
Frank said to the dreadlocked one, ‘Hey, can I follow you and learn the course?’
‘Well sure, but we do run it, as you see.’
‘Oh yeah that’s fine, I’ll keep up.’
‘Sure then. You want a frisbee to throw?’
‘I’d probably lose it.’
‘Always possible out here, but try this one. I found it today, so it must be meant for you.’
‘Okay.’
Like any other climber, Frank had spent a fair amount of camp time tossing a frisbee back and forth. He much preferred it to hackysack, which he was no good at. Now he took the disk they gave him and followed them to their next tee, and threw it last, conservatively, as his main desire was to keep it going straight up the narrow fairway. His shot only went half as far as theirs, but he could see where it had crashed into the overgrown grass, so he considered it a success, and ran after the others. They were pretty fast, not sprinting but moving right along, at what Frank guessed was about a seven-minute mile pace if they kept it up; and they slowed only briefly to pick up their frisbees and throw them again. It quickly became apparent that the slowing down, throwing, and starting up again cost more energy than running straight through would have, and Frank had to focus on the work of it. The players pointed out the next target, and trusted he would not clock them in the backs of their heads after they threw and ran off. And in fact if he shot immediately after them he could fire it over their heads and keep his shot straight.
Some of the targets were trash cans, tree trunks, or big rocks, but most were metal baskets on metal poles, the poles standing chest high and supporting chains that hung from a ring at the top. Frank had never seen such a thing before. The frisbee had to hit the chains in such a way that its momentum was stopped and it fell in the basket. If it bounced out it was like a rimmer in golf or basketball, and a put-in shot had to be added to one’s score.
One of the players made a putt from about twenty yards away, and they all hooted. Frank saw no sign they were keeping score or competing. The dreadlocked player threw and his frisbee too hit the chains, but fell to the ground. ‘Shit.’ Off they ran to pick them up and start the next hole. Frank threw an easy approach shot, then tossed his frisbee in.
‘What was par there?’ he asked as he ran with them.
‘Three. They’re all threes but three, which is a two, and nine, which is a four.’
‘There’s nine holes?’
‘Yes, but we play the course backward too, so we have eighteen. Backward they’re totally different.’
‘I see.’
So they ran, stopped, stooped, threw, and took off again, chasing the shots like dogs. Frank got into his running rhythm, and realized their pace was more the equivalent of an eight or nine-minute mile. He could run with these guys, then. Throwing was another matter, they were amazingly strong and accurate; their shots had a miraculous quality, flying right to the baskets and often crashing into the chains from quite a distance.
‘You guys are good!’ he said at one tee.
‘It’s just practice,’ the dreadlocked one said. ‘We play a lot.’
‘It’s our religion,’ one of the others said, and his companions cackled as they made their next drives.
Then one of Frank’s own approach shots clanged into the chains and dropped straight in, from about thirty yards out. The others hooted loudly in congratulation.
On his next approach he focused on throwing at the basket, let go, watched it fly straight there and hit with a resounding clash of the chains. A miracle! A glow filled him, and he ran with an extra bounce in his step.
At the end of their round they stood steaming in the dusk, not far from the picnic area and the homeless guys. The players compared numbers, ‘twenty-eight,’ ‘thirty-three,’ which turned out to be how many strokes under par they were for the day. Then high fives and handshakes, and they began to move off in different directions.
‘I want to do that again,’ Frank said to the dreadlocked guy.
‘Any time, you were keeping right with us. We’re here most days around this time.’ He headed off in the direction of the homeless guys, and Frank accompanied him, thinking to return to his dinner site and clear away his trash.
The homeless guys were still there, nattering at each other like Laurel and Hardy: ‘I did not! You did. I did not, you did.’ Something in the intonation revealed to Frank that these were the two he had heard the night before, passing him in the dark.
‘Now you wanna play?’ the chess player said when he saw Frank.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
He sat across from the boy, sweating, still feeling the glow of his miracle shot. Throwing on the run; no doubt it was a very old thing, a hunter thing. His whole brain and body had been working out there. Hunting, sure, and the finding and picking up of the frisbees in the dusk was like gathering. Hunting and gathering; and maybe these were no longer the same activities if one were hunting for explanations, or gathering data. Maybe only physical hunting and gathering would do.
The homeless guys droned on, bickering over their half-assed efforts to get a fire started in the stone fireplace. A piece of shit, as one called it.
‘Who built that?’ Frank asked.
‘National Park. Yeah, look at it. It’s got a roof.’
‘It looks like a smoker.’
‘They were idiots.’
‘It was the WPA, probly.’
Frank said, ‘Isn’t this place closed at dusk?’
‘Yeah right.’
‘The whole fucking park is closed, man. Twenty-four seven.’
‘Closed for the duration.’
‘Yeah right.’
‘Closed until further notice.’
‘Five dollar game?’ the youngster said to Frank, rattling the box of pieces.
Frank sighed. ‘I don’t want to bet. I’ll play you for free.’ Frank waved at the first vet. ‘I’ll be more batting practice for you, like him.’
‘Zeno ain’t never just batting practice!’
The boy’s frown was different. ‘Well, okay.’
Frank hadn’t played since a long-ago climbing expedition to the Cirque of the Unclimbables, a setting in which chess had always seemed as inconsequential as tiddly-winks. Now he quickly found that using the timer actually helped his game, by making him give up analyzing the situation in depth in favor of just going with the flow of things, with the shape or pattern. In the literature they called this approach a ‘good-enough decision heuristic,’ although in this case it wasn’t even close to good enough; he attacked on the left side, had both knights out and a great push going, and then suddenly it was all revealed as hollow, and he was looking at the wrong end of the end game.
‘Shit,’ he said, obscurely pleased.
‘Told ya,’ Zeno scolded him.
The night was warm and full of spring smells, mixing with the mud stench. Frank was still hot from the frisbee run. Some distant gawking cries wafted up from the ravine, as if peacocks were on the loose. The guys at the next table were laughing hard. The third vet was sitting on the ground, trying to read a Post by laying it on the ground in front of the fitful fire. ‘You can only see the fire if you lie on the ground, or look right down the smoke hole. How stupid is that?’ They rained curses on their miserable fire. Chessman finished boxing his chess pieces and took off.
Zeno said to Frank, ‘Why didn’t you play him for money, man? Take him five blow jobs to make up for that.’
‘Whoah,’ Frank said, startled.
Zeno laughed, a harsh ragged bray, mocking and aggressive, tobacco-raspy. ‘HA ha ha.’ A kind of rebuke or slap. He had the handsome face of a movie villain, a sidekick to someone like Charles Bronson or Jack Palance. ‘Ha ha – what you think, man?’
Frank bagged his dinner boxes and stood. ‘What if I had beat him?’
‘You ain’t gonna beat him.’ With a twist of the mouth that added, asshole.
‘Next time,’ Frank promised, and took off.
Primate in forest. Warm and sweaty, full of food, beer and ouzo; still fully endorphined from running with the frisbee guys. It was dark now, although the park wore the same nightcap of noctilucent cloud it had the night before, close over the trees. It provided enough light to see by, just barely. The tree trunks were obvious in some somatic sense; Frank slipped between them as if dodging furniture in a dark house he knew very well. He felt alert, relaxed. Exfoliating in the vegetable night, in the background hum of the city, the click of twigs under his feet. He swam through the park.
An orange flicker glimpsed in the distance caused him to slow down, change direction, approach it at an angle. He hid behind trees as he approached. He sidled closer, like a spy or a hunter. It felt good. Like the frisbee run, but different. He got close enough to be sure it was a campfire, at the center of another brace of picnic tables. Here they had a normal fire ring to work with. Faces in the firelight: bearded, dirty, ruddy. Homeless guys like the ones behind him, like the ones on the street corners around the city, sitting by signs asking for money. Mostly men, but there was one woman sitting at this fire, knitting. She gave the whole scene a domestic look, like something out of Hogarth.
After a while Frank moved on, descending in darkness through the trees. The gash of the torn ravine appeared below him, white in the darkness. A broad canyon of sandstone, brilliant under the luminous cloud. The creek was a black ribbon cutting through it. Probably the moon was near full, somewhere up above the clouds; there was more light than the city alone could account for. Both the cloud ceiling and the newly torn ravine glowed, the sandstone like sinuous naked flesh.
A truck, rumbling in the distance. The sound of the creek burbling over stones. Distant laughter, a car starting; tinkle of broken glass; something like a dumpster lid slamming down. And always the hum of the city, a million noises blended together, like the light caught in the cloud. It was neither quiet, nor dark, nor empty. It definitely was not wilderness. It was city and forest simultaneously. It was hard to characterize how it felt.
Where would one sleep out here?
Immediately the question organized his walk. He had been wandering before, but now he was on the hunt again. He saw that many things were a hunt. It did not have to be a hunt to kill and eat animals. Any search on foot was a kind of hunt. As now.
He ranged up and away from the ravine. First in importance would be seclusion. A flat dry spot, tucked out of the way. There, for instance, a tree had been knocked over in the flood, its big tangle of roots raised to the sky, creating a partial cave under it – but too damp, too closed in.
Cobwebs caught his face and he wiped them away. He looked up into the network of black branches. Being up in a tree would solve so many problems … That was a prehominid thought, perhaps caused merely by craning his neck back. No doubt there was an arboreal complex in the brain crying out: Go home, go home!
He ranged uphill, moving mostly northward. A hilltop was another option. He looked at one of the knolls that divided Rock Creek’s vestigial western tributaries. Nice in some ways; flat; but as with root hollows, these were places where all manner of creatures might take refuge. The truth was that the best nooks were best for everything out there. A distant crash in the brush reminded him that this might include the zoo’s jaguar.
He would need to make some daytime explorations, that was clear. He could always stay in his van, of course, but this felt more real. Scouting trips for the Feral Observation Group. We’re all in the fog now, Nancy had said. He would spend some of his time hunting for animals. A kind of return to the paleolithic, right here in Washington D.C. Repaleolithization: it sounded very scientific, like the engineers who spoke of amishization when they meant to simplify a design. Landscape restoration inside the brain. The pursuit of happiness; and the happiness was in the pursuit.
Frank smiled briefly. He realized he had been tense ever since leaving the rented apartment. Now he was more relaxed, watchful but relaxed, moving about easily. It was late, he was getting tired. Another branch across the face and he decided to call it a night.
He made his way west to Connecticut, hit it at Fessenden, walked south on the sidewalk blinking in the flood of light. It might as well have been Las Vegas or Miami to him now, everything blazing neon colors in the warm spring night. People were out. He strolled along among them. The city too was a habitat, and as such a riot of sensation. He would have to think about how that fit in with the repaleolithization project, because the city was a big part of contemporary society, and people were obviously addicted to it. Frank was himself, at least to parts of it. The technological sublime made everything magical, as if they were all tripping with the shaman – but all the time, which was too much. They had therefore lost touch with reality, gone mad as a collective.
And yet this street was reality too. He would have to think about all this.
When he came to his van no one was in sight, and he slipped inside and locked the doors. It was dark, quiet, comfortable. Very much like a room. A bit stuffy; he turned on the power, cracked the windows. He could start the engine and power the air conditioner for a while if he really needed to.
He set his wristwatch alarm for 4:30 AM, afraid he might sleep through the dawn in such a room. Then he lay down on his familiar old mattress, and felt his body start to relax even further. Home sweet home! It made him laugh.
At 4:30 his alarm beeped. He squeezed it quiet and slipped on his running shoes and got out of the van before his sleepiness knocked him back down. Out into the dawn, the world of grays. This was how cats must see, all the grays so finely gradated. A different kind of seeing altogether.
Into the forest again. The leafy venation of the forest air was a masterpiece of three-dimensionality, the precise spacing of everything suggesting some kind of vast sculpture, as in an Ansel Adams photo. The human eye had an astonishing depth of field.
He stood over the tawny sandstone of Rock Creek’s newly burnished ravine, hearing his breathing. It was barely cool. The sky was shifting from a flat gray to a curved pale blue.
‘Oooooooooop!’
He shivered deep in his flesh, like a horse.
The sound came from overhead; a rising ‘oooooooooo’ that then suddenly fell. Something like the cooing of a dove, or the call of a coyote. A voice, or a kind of siren – musical, unearthly, bizarre. Glissandos up and down. Voices, yes. Gibbons and/or siamangs. Frank had heard such calls long ago, at the San Diego Zoo.
It sounded like there were several of them now. ‘Ooooop! Ooooooooooop! Oooooooooooop!’
Lows to highs, penetrating and pure. The hair on Frank’s neck was sticking out.
He tried it himself. ‘Ooooooop!’ he sang, softly. It seemed to fit in. He could do a fair imitation of one part of their range. His voice wasn’t as fluid, or as clear in tone, and yet still, it was somewhat the same. Close enough to join in unobtrusively.
So he sang with them, and stepped ever so slowly between the trees, looking up trying to catch a glimpse of them. They were feeding off each other’s energy, sounding more and more rambunctious. Wild animals! And they were celebrating the new day, there was no doubt about it. Maybe even celebrating their freedom. There was no way to tell, but to Frank it sounded like it.
Certainly it was true for him – the sound filled him, the morning filled him, spring and all, and he bellowed ‘Oooooooopee oop oop!’ voice cracking at its highest. He longed to sing higher; he hooted as loudly as he could. The gibbons didn’t care. It wasn’t at all clear they had even noticed him. He tried to imitate all the calls he was hearing, failed at most of them. Up, down, crescendo, decrescendo, pianissimo, fortissimo. An intoxicating music. Had any composer ever heard this, ever used this? What were people doing, thinking they knew what music was?
The chorus grew louder and more agitated as the sky lightened. When sunlight pierced the forest they all went crazy together.
Then he saw three of them in the trees, sitting on high branches. He saw their long arms and longer tails, their broad shoulders and skinny butts. One swung away on arms that were as long as its body, to land on a branch by another, accept a cuff and hoot some more. Again their raucous noise buffeted Frank. When they finally quieted down, after an earsplitting climax, the green day was upon them.
Senator Phil Chase said, ‘You know, it’s not a question of you being right and me being wrong.’
‘Of course not,’ Charlie Quibler replied.
Phil grinned. ‘We all agreed that global warming was real.’
‘Yes, of course we did.’
‘No!’ Joe Quibler murmured as he drowsed on Charlie’s back.
Phil laughed to hear it. ‘You’ve got a lie detector there.’
‘Going off all the time, in this company.’
‘Ha ha. Looks like he’s waking up.’
Charlie glanced over his shoulder. ‘I better start walking.’
‘I’ll join you. I can’t stand any more of this anyway.’
They were at the Vietnam Memorial, attending a ceremony to mark its reopening. Phil, a veteran who had served as an Army reporter in Saigon for a year, had said a few words; then the President had shown up, but only near the end, the feeling among his people being that this was one memorial that would be better left buried in the mud. After that Phil was forgotten by the press on hand, which did not surprise him; but Charlie could tell by the slight tightness at the corner of his mouth that the calculated back of the hand to Vietnam had irritated him.
In any case they were free to leave. Normally Phil would have been whisked by car up the Mall to his offices, but a cancellation had opened a half-hour slot in his schedule. ‘Let’s go say hi to Abe,’ he muttered, and turned them west. Offering this gift of time to Charlie; it was as close to an apology as Charlie would ever get.
A month earlier, right before the flood, Charlie had helped craft a giant bill for Phil, designed to jumpstart a real engagement with the climate change problem. Then, in the last phase of intense committee negotiations, Phil had dismantled the bill to get a small part of it passed, effectively destroying the rest. He had promised Charlie he wouldn’t, but he had; and had done so without warning Charlie he was going to.
At the time Charlie had been furious. Phil had shrugged him off. ‘I am only doing the necessary,’ he said, in his version of an Indian accent. ‘I must first be doing the necessary.’
But Charlie did not believe it had been necessary. And it did not help that since the flood Phil had been widely hailed as a prophet on the climate issue. Phil had laughed at this little irony, had thanked Charlie, had ignored with aplomb all Charlie’s explicit and implied I-told-you-sos. ‘It’s all really a compliment to you, Charles – to you and your unworkable brilliance.’
‘Um hmm,’ Charlie said. ‘Yeah right.’
He was enjoying the situation too much to invent his side of the banter. Two old colleagues, out for a walk to the Lincoln Monument; it was the rarest thing in town.
Landscaping equipment dotted the newly restored bank of the Potomac, and the background buzz of the city was augmented by their noise. The violent diesel huffing and puffing might have startled some sleeping children awake, but it served as a lullaby to Joe Quibler; the noise of trucks shifting gears on Wisconsin was his usual soporific, and he loved all big grinding sounds. So now he snoozed happily on, head nestled into the back of Charlie’s neck as they approached the memorial.
This part of the Mall had been twenty feet under the rush of the Potomac during the flood, and being landfill to begin with it had not put up very much resistance to the spate; much of it had been torn away, leaving the Lincoln Memorial an island in the stream. ‘Check it out,’ Charlie said to Phil, pointing up at the big white foursquare building. There was a dark horizontal line partway up it. ‘High water mark. Twenty-three feet above normal.’
Phil frowned at the sight. ‘You know, the goddammed House is never going to appropriate enough money to clean up this city.’
Senators and their staffs often had an immense disdain for the House of Representatives. ‘True.’
‘It’s too much like one of their Bible prophecies, what was that one?’
‘Noah’s flood? Revelation?’
‘Maybe. Anyway they’re loving it. No way they’re going to allocate money to interfere with God’s judgment. That would be bad. That would be worse than, than what – than raising taxes!’
‘Joe’ll wake up if you yell like that.’
‘Sorry. I’ll calm down.’
Joe rolled his head on Charlie’s neck. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Ha,’ Phil said, grinning. ‘Caught in another one.’
Charlie could just glimpse the boy’s red cheek and furrowed brow. He could feel Joe’s agitation; clearly he was once more locked into one of his mighty dreams, which from his sleeping scowls and jerks appeared to be fierce struggles, filled with heartfelt Nos. Joe awakened from them with big sighs of relief, as if escaping to a quieter, lesser reality, a kind of vacation cosmos. It worried Charlie.
Phil noticed Joe’s distress, patted his damp head. Step by broad step they ascended the Memorial.
To Phil this place was sacred ground. He loved Lincoln, had studied his life, often read in the nine volumes of his collected works. ‘This is a good place,’ he said as he always did when visiting the memorial. ‘Solid. Foursquare. Like a dolmen. Like the Parthenon.’
‘Especially now, with all the scaffolding.’
Phil looked in at the big statue, still stained to the knees, a sight that made him grimace. ‘You know, this city and the Federal government are synonymous. They stand for each other, like when people call the administration “the White House”. What is that, metonymy?’
‘Metonymy or synecdoche, I can never remember which.’
‘No one can.’ Phil walked inside, stopped short at the sight of the stained inner walls. ‘Damn it. They are going to let this city sink back into the swamp it came out of.’
‘That’s synecdoche I think. Or the pathetic fallacy.’
‘Pathetic for sure, but how is it patriotic? How do they sell that?’
‘Please Phil, you’re gonna wake him up. They have it both ways, you know. They use code phrases that mean something different to the Christian right than to anyone else.’
‘Like the beast will be slain or whatnot?’
‘Yes, and sometimes even more subtle than that.’
‘Ha ha. Clerics, everywhere you look. Ours are as bad as the foreign ones. Make people hate their government at the same time you’re scaring them with terrorists, what kind of program is that?’ Phil drifted through the subdued crowd toward the left wall, into which was incised the Gettysburg Address. The final lines were obscured by the flood’s high water mark, a sight which made him scowl. ‘They had better clean this up.’
‘Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all.’
‘Abraham Lincoln was no Republican.’
‘Hello?’
‘The Republicans in Congress hated him like poison. The goddammed Copperheads did everything they could to sabotage him. They cheered when he was killed, because then they could claim him as a martyr and rip off the South in his name.’
‘Limited value in hitting them with that now.’
‘But it’s still happening! I mean whatever happened to government of the people by the people and for the people not perishing from this earth?’ Pointing at the marred lines on the wall, looking as heavily symbolic as an image in a Cocteau film.
‘An idea that lost?’ Charlie said, spurring him on.
‘Democracy can’t lose. It has to succeed.’
‘“Democracy will never succeed, it takes up too many evenings.”’
‘Ha. Who said that?’
‘Oscar Wilde.’
‘Please. I mean, I see his point, but don’t quote Oscar Wilde to me when I’m trying to think like Abraham Lincoln.’
‘Wilde may be more your level.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘Wilde was witty just like that.’
‘Ha ha ha.’
Charlie gave up tweaking Phil in favor of contemplating the mud-stained statue of the sixteenth president. It was a great work: massive, brooding, uneasy. The big square-toed boots and obviously handmade broadcoat somehow evoked the whole world of the nineteenth century frontier. This was the spirit that America had given to the world – its best gesture, its exemplary figure.
His oversized hands were dirty. The great bearded head looked sadly over them. The whole interior space of the building had a greatness about it – the uncanny statue, the high square ceiling, the monumental lettering of the speeches on the side walls, the subdued people visiting it. Even the kids there were quiet and watchful.
Perhaps it was this that woke Joe. He yawned, arched back in his seat, whacked Charlie on the head. ‘Down! Down!’
‘Okay okay.’
Charlie went back outside to let him down. Phil came along, and they sat on the top step and let Joe stretch his legs behind them.
A TV crew was working at the bottom of the steps, filming what looked to be a story on the memorial’s reattachment to land. When the reporter spotted them, he came up to ask Phil if he would make a comment for the program.
‘My pleasure,’ Phil said. The reporter waved his crew over, and soon Phil was standing before the camera in a spot where Lincoln loomed over his left shoulder, launching into one of his characteristic improvs. ‘I’m sick of people putting Washington down,’ he said, waving a hand at the city. ‘What makes America special is our constitution, and the laws based on it – it’s our government that makes America something to be proud of, and that government is based here. So I don’t like to see people wrapping themselves in the flag while they trash the very country they pretend to love. Abraham Lincoln would not stand for it –’
‘Thanks, Senator! I’m sure we can use that. Some of it, anyway.’
‘I should hope so.’
Then a shout of alarm came from inside the building, causing Charlie to shoot to his feet and spin around, looking for Joe – no luck. ‘Joe!’ he cried, rushing inside.
Past the pillars he skidded to a halt, Phil and the TV crew crashing in behind him. Joe was sitting up on Lincoln’s knee, far above them, looking around curiously, seemingly unaware of the long drop to the marble floor.
‘Joe!’ Charlie tried to catch his attention without causing him to topple off. ‘Joe! Don’t move! Joe! Stay there!’
How the hell did you get up there, he didn’t add. Because Lincoln’s marble chair was smooth and vertical on all sides; there was no way up it even for an adult. It almost seemed like someone had to have lifted him up there. Of course he was an agile guy, a real monkey, very happy on the climbing structures at Gymboree. If there was a way, he had the will.
Charlie hustled around the statue, hoping to find Joe’s route up and follow it himself. There was no way. ‘Joe! Stay right there! Stay right there till we get you!’
A group was gathering at Lincoln’s feet, ready to catch Joe if he fell off. He sat there looking down at them with an imperial serenity, completely at ease. The TV cameraman was filming everything.
The best Charlie could think to do was to request a boost from two willing young men, and clamber onto their shoulders as they stood on Lincoln’s right boot and wrapped their arms around his calf. From there Charlie could reach up with his arms and almost reach Joe, although at that point it was a balancing act, and things were precarious. He had to talk Joe into toppling over into his hands, which of course took a while, as Joe was clearly happy where he was. Eventually, however, he tipped forward and Charlie caught him, and let him down between his legs onto the two young men and a nest of hands, before falling back himself into the arms of the crowd.
The crowd cheered briefly, then gave them a little round of applause. Charlie thanked the two young men as he collected the squirming Joe from other strangers.
‘Jesus, Joe! Why do you do these things?’
‘Look!’
‘Yeah yeah, look. But how the hell did you get up there?’
‘Up!’
Charlie took some deep breaths, feeling a bit sick to his stomach. If the TV station ran the story, which they probably would, and if Anna saw it, which she probably wouldn’t, then he would be in big trouble. But what could you do? He had only taken his eye off him for a second!
Phil got back in front of the camera with them, heightening the chances it would make it to the news. ‘This is my young friend Joe Quibler and his father Charlie, a member of my staff. Good job, you guys. You know, citizens like Joe are the ones we have to think about when we consider what sort of world we’re going to be handing along to them. That’s what government is, it’s making the world we want to give to our kids. People should think about that before they put down Washington D.C. and our country’s government. Lincoln would not approve!’
Indeed, Lincoln stared down at the scene with a knowing and disenchanted air. He looked concerned about the fate of the republic, just as Phil had implied.
The reporter asked Phil a few more questions, and then Phil signaled that he had to go. The TV crew shut down, and the little crowd that had stayed to watch dissipated.
Phil phoned his office to get a car sent, and while they waited he shook some hands. Charlie roamed the sanctum with Joe in his arms, looking for routes up to the great American’s lap. There were some disassembled scaffolds stacked on their sides against the back wall of the chamber, behind Lincoln and next to an inner pillar; it was just conceivable that Joe had monkeyed up those. Easier than doing a dirretissima up Lincoln’s calf, but still. It was hard to figure.
‘God damn, Joe,’ Charlie muttered. ‘How do you do this stuff?’
Eventually he rejoined Phil, and they stood on the steps of the memorial, holding Joe by the hand between them and swinging him out toward the reflecting pools, causing Joe to laugh helplessly.
Phil said, ‘You know, we’re swinging him right over the spot Martin Luther King stood on when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He is really touching all the bases today.’
Charlie, still a little bit shaky with relief, laughed and said, ‘Phil, you should run for President.’
Phil grinned his beautiful grin. ‘You think so?’
‘Yes. Believe me, I don’t want to say it. It would mean endless hassle for me, and I haven’t got the time.’
‘You? What about me?’ Phil was looking back up into the building.
‘Endless hassle for you too, sure. But you already live that way, right? It would just be more of the same.’
‘A lot more.’
‘But if you’re going to run for high office at all, you might as well make the biggest impact you can. Besides you’re one of the only people in the world who can beat the happy man.’
‘You think so?’
‘I do. You’re the World’s Senator, right? And the world needs you, Phil. I mean, when the hyperpower goes crazy what are the rest of us going to do? We need help. It’s more than just cleaning up the city here. More even than America. It’s the whole world needs help now.’
‘A godawful fate,’ Phil murmured, looking up at the somber and unencouraging Lincoln. A bad idea, Lincoln seemed to be saying. Serious business. Copperheads striking at heel and head. You put your life on the line. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’
TWO (#ulink_6ea2364e-981a-5c79-b7ca-afeca2c62e14)
Abrupt Climate Change (#ulink_6ea2364e-981a-5c79-b7ca-afeca2c62e14)
The ground is mud. There are a few sandstone rocks scattered here and there, and some river-rounded chunks of amber quartzite, but for the most part, mud. Hard enough to walk on, but dismal to sit or lie on.
The canopy stands about a hundred feet overhead. In the summer it is a solid green ceiling, with only isolated shafts and patches of sunlight slanting all the way to the ground. The biggest trees have trunks that are three or four feet in diameter, and they shoot up without thinning, putting out their first major branches some forty or fifty feet overhead. There are no evergreens, or rather, no conifers. No needles on the ground, no pinecones. The annual drift of leaves disintegrates entirely, and that’s the mud: centuries of leaf mulch.
The trees are either very big or very small, the small ones spindly and light-starved, doomed-looking. There are hardly any medium-sized trees; it is hard to understand the succession story. Only after Frank joined FOG did he learn from one of his associates that the succession was in fact messed up, its balance thrown off by the ballooning population of white-tailed deer, whose natural predators had all been eradicated. No more wolf or puma; and so for generations now the new young trees had been mostly eaten by deer.
Big or small, all the trees were second or third growth; the whole watershed had been clear-cut before the Civil War, and during the war the guns of Fort DeRussey, at the high point of the park near Military Road and Oregon Avenue, had a clear shot in all directions, and had once fired across the gorge at a Confederate scouting party.
The park was established in 1890, and developed with the help of the great designer Frederick Law Olmstead; his sons’ firm wrote a plan at the end of the First World War that guided the park through the rest of the twentieth century. Now, in the wake of the flood, it appeared to have reverted to the great hardwood forest that had blanketed the eastern half of the continent for millions of years.
The muddy forest floor was corrugated, with any number of small channels appearing in the slope down to Rock Creek. Some of these channels cut as deep as thirty feet, but they always remained mud troughs, with no stony creekbeds down their middles. Water didn’t stay in them after a rain.
The forest appeared to be empty. It was easy to hike around in, but there was little to see. The animals, both native and feral, seemed to make efforts to stay concealed.
There was trash all over. Plastic bottles were the most common item, then glass bottles, then miscellaneous: boxes, shoes, plastic bag scraps … one plastic grocery bag hung in a branch over Rock Creek like a prayer flag. Another high-water mark.
There were many more signs of the flood. Most of the park’s roads, paths, and picnic areas had been located down by the creek, and so were now buried in mud or torn away. The gorge walls were scarred by landslides. Many trees had been uprooted, and some of these had been caught by the Boulder Bridge, forming a dam there that held a narrow lake upstream. The raw sandstone walls undercut by this lake were studded with boulders emerging from a softer matrix. All over the forest above these new cliffs, windrows of downed trees, root balls, branches and trash dotted the forest floor.
The higher roads and trails had survived. The Western Ridge Trail extended the length of the park on its eponymous ridge, and was intact. The nine numbered cross-trails running down from the ridge trail into the gorge now all ended abruptly at some point. Up north near the Maryland border, the Pinehurst Branch Trail was gone, its creekbed ripped like the main gorge.
Before the flood there had been thirty little picnic areas in the park, ten of them reserved for use by permit. The higher ones were damaged, the dozen on the creek gone. Almost all of them had been paltry things, as far as Frank could determine in the aftermath – small clearings with picnic tables, fireplaces, a trashcan. Site 21 was the worst in the park, two old tables in perpetual gloom, stuck at the bottom of a damp hollow that ran right onto Ross Drive. With that road closed to traffic, of course, it had gained some new privacy. Indeed in the mud under one table Frank found a used condom and an item of women’s pink underwear, Disney brand, picture of Ariel on waistband, tag saying Sunday. Hopefully they had had a blanket with them. Hopefully they had had fun. The condom seemed a good sign.
East of site 21 the drop to the creek was steep. The big trees that had survived overhung the water. Sandstone boulders as big as cars stood in the stream. There was no sign of the gravel path the map indicated had run up the western bank, and only short stretches of Beach Drive, a two-lane car road which had paralleled it on the eastern side. Above a flat-walled boulder, set crosswise in the stream, tall trees canted out over the creek into the open air. Across the ravine was a steep wall of green. Here the sound of the creek was louder than the sound of the city. If Beach Drive stayed closed to traffic, as it looked like it would, then water would remain the loudest sound here, followed by insects. Some birds were audible. The squirrels had grey fluffy backs, and stomachs covered with much finer fur, the same gold-copper color as the lion tamarins still missing from the zoo.
There were lots of deer, white-tailed in name and fact, big-eared, quick through the trees. It was a trick to move quietly through the forest after them, because small branches were everywhere underfoot, ready to snap in the mud. People were easier to track than deer. The windrows were the only good place to hide; the big tree trunks were broad enough to hide behind, but then you had to look around them to see, exposing yourself to view.
What would the forest look like in the autumn? What would it look like in winter? How many of the feral animals could survive a winter out?
It turned out that Home Depot sold a pretty good treehouse kit. Its heavy-duty hardware allowed one to collar several floor beams securely to trunk or major branches, and after that it was a simple matter of two-by-fours and plywood, cut to whatever dimensions one wanted. The rest of the kit consisted mostly of fripperies, the gingerbread fill making a Swiss Family allusion that caused Frank to smile, remembering his own childhood dreams: he had always wanted a treehouse. But these days he wanted it simple.
Getting that was complicated. For a while he left work as early as he could and drove to one edge of the park or another, testing routes and parking places. Then it was off into the park on foot, using a Potomac Appalachian Trail Club map to learn it. He hiked all the trails that had survived, but usually these were just jumping-off points for rambles in the forest and scrambles in the gorge.
At first he could not find a tree he liked. He had wanted an evergreen, preferably in a stand of other evergreens. But almost every tree in Rock Creek Park was deciduous. Beech, oak, sycamore, ash, poplar, maple – he couldn’t even tell which was which. All of them had tall straight trunks, with first branches very high, and crowns of foliage above that. Their bark had different textures, however, and by that sign – bark corrugated in a vertical diamond pattern – he decided that the best trees were probably chestnut oaks.
There were many of these upstream from site 21. One of them canted out and overhung the creek. It looked as if its upper branches would have a nice view, but until he climbed it he wouldn’t know.
While making his reconnaissances he often ran into the frisbee golfers, and when he did he usually joined them. In running the course they always passed site 21, and if the homeless guys were there the second vet, whose name was Andy, would shout his abrasive welcome: ‘Who’s winning? Who’s winning?’ The frisbee players usually stopped to chat for a moment. Spencer, the player with the dreadlocks, would ask what had happened lately, and sometimes get an earful in response. Then they were off again, Spencer in the lead, dreadlocks flying under bandana, Robin and Robert following at speed. Robin sounded like some kind of deist or animist, everything was alive to him, and after his throws he always shouted instructions to his frisbee or begged for help from the trees. Robert spoke more in the style of a sports announcer commenting on the play. Spencer spoke only in shrieks and howls, some kind of shaman language; but he was the one who chatted with the homeless guys.
During one of these pass-bys Frank saw that Chessman was there, and under Zeno’s baleful eye he offered to come back and play him for money. Chessman nodded, looking pleased.
So after the run Frank returned, toting a pizza in a box and a sixpack of Pabst. ‘Hey the doctor’s here,’ Zeno said in his heavy joking tone. Frank ignored that, sat down and lost ten dollars to the boy, playing the best he could but confirming his impression that he was seriously outclassed. He said little, left as soon as it seemed okay.
The first time he climbed his candidate chestnut oak he had to use crampons, ice axe, and a telephone linesman’s pole-climbing kit that he had from his window-washing days, dug out of the depths of his storage locker. Up the tree at dawn, kicking in like a telephone lineman, slinging up the strap and leaning back in his harness, up and up, through the scrawny understory and into the fork of the first two big branches. It was nice to be able to sink an ice axe in anywhere one liked; an awkward climb, nevertheless. It would be good to confirm a tree and install a ladder.
Up here he saw that one major branch curved out over the creek, then divided into two. That fork would provide a foundation, and somewhat block the view from below. He only needed a platform a bit bigger than his sleeping bag, something like a ledge bivouac on a wall climb. There was a grand view of the ravine wall opposite him, green to a height considerably higher than he was. Glimpses of the burbling creek downstream, but no view of the ground directly below. It looked good.
After that he parked and slept in the residential neighborhood to the west, and got up before dawn and hiked into the forest carrying lumber and climbing gear. This was pretty conspicuous, but at that time of day the gray neighborhood and park were completely deserted. It was only a ten-minute hike in any case, a drop through forest that would usually be empty even at the busiest time of a Sunday afternoon.
He only needed two dawn patrols to install a climbing ladder, wound on an electric winch that he reeled up and down using a garage-door remote he found at Radio Shack. After that the two-by-sixes, the two-by-fours, and two three-by-five sheets of half-inch plywood could be hauled up using the ladder as a winch cable. Climb the ladder with the miscellaneous stuff, ice axing into the trunk for balance, backpack full of hardware and tools.
Collar around trunk; beams on branches; plywood floor; low railing, gapped for the ladder. He maneuvered slowly around the trunk as he worked, slung in a self-belay from a piton nailed above him. Cirque du Soleil meets Home Improvement. Using woodscrews rather than nails reduced the sound of construction, while also making the thing stronger.
Every day an hour’s work in the green horizontal light, and all too soon it was finished, and then furnished. A clear plastic tarp stapled and glued to the trunk overhead served as a see-through roof, tied out to branches on a slant to let the rain run off. The opening in the rail, the winch screwed down to the plywood just inside it. Duffel bag against the trunk holding rolled foam mattress, sleeping bag, pillow, lantern, gear.
Standing on the platform without his sling one morning, in the slanting light that told him it was time to drive to work, he saw that the thing was built. Too bad! He would have liked the project to have lasted longer.
Driving across town that morning, he thought, Now I have two bedrooms, in a modular home distributed throughout the city. One bedroom was mobile, the other in a tree. How cool was that? How perfectly rational and sane?
Over in Arlington he drove to the NSF basement parking lot, then walked over to Optimodal Exercise to shower.
Big, new, clean, blazingly well-lit; it was a shocking contrast to the dawn forest, and he always changed at his locker feeling a bit stunned. Then it was off to the weight room.
His favorite there was a pull-down bar that gave his lats a workout they otherwise would not get. Low weight, high reps, the pull like something between swimming and climbing. A peaceful warm-up, on his knees as if praying.
Then over to the leg press. Here too he was a low-weight high-rep kind of guy, although since joining the club it had occurred to him that precisely the advantage of a weight room over the outdoors was the chance to do strength work. So now he upped the weight, for a few hard pushes at the end of the set.
Up and down, back and forth, push and pull, all the while taking in the other people in the room: watching the women, to be precise. Without ever actually focusing on them. Lifting, running, rowing, whatever they did, Frank liked it. He had a thing for jock women that long predated his academic interest in sociobiology. Indeed it seemed likely that he had gotten into the latter to explain the former – because for as long as he could remember, women doing sports had been the ultimate stimulus to his attraction. He loved the way sports moves became female when women did them – more graceful, more like dance – and he loved the way the moves revealed the shapes of their bodies. Surely this was another very ancient primate pleasure.
At Optimodal this all remained true even though there was not a great deal of athleticism on display. Often it was a case of non-athletes trying to ‘get in shape,’ so that Frank was covertly observing women in various stages of cardiovascular distress. But that was fine too: sweaty pink faces, hard breathing; obviously this was sexy stuff. None of that bedroom silliness for Frank – lingerie, make-up, even dancing – all that was much too intentional and choreographed, even somehow confrontational. Lovelier by far were women unselfconsciously exerting themselves in some physical way.
‘Oh hi Frank.’
He jumped a foot.
‘Hi Diane!’
She was sitting in a leg press seat, now grinning: ‘Sorry, I startled you.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘So you did join.’
‘Yes, that’s right. It’s just like you said. Very nice. But don’t let me interrupt you.’
‘No, I was done.’
She took up a hand towel and wiped her brow. She looked different in gym clothes, of course. Short, rounded, muscular; hard to characterize, but she looked good. She drew the eye. Anyway, she drew Frank’s eye; presumably everyone was different that way.
She sat there, barefoot and sweaty. ‘Do you want to get on here?’
‘Oh no, no hurry. I’m just kind of waking myself up to tell the truth.’
‘Okay.’
She blew a strand of hair away from her mouth, kicked out against the weight ten times, slowing down in the last reps. She smelled faintly of sweat and soap. Presumably also pheromones, estrogens, estrogenlike compounds, and perfumes.
‘You’ve got a lot on the stack there.’
‘Do I?’ She peered at the weights. ‘Not so much.’
‘Two hundred pounds. Your legs are stronger than mine.’
‘I doubt that.’
But it was true, at least on that machine. Diane pressed the two hundred ten more times; then Frank replaced her and keyed down the weights. Diane picked up a dumbbell and did some curls while he kicked in his traces. She had very nice biceps. Firm muscles under flushed wet skin. Absence of fur made all this so visible. On the savannah they would have been watching each other all the time, aware of each other as bodies.
He wondered if he could make an observation like that to Diane, and if he did, what she would say. She had surprised him often enough recently that he had become cautious about predicting her.
She was looking at the line of runners on treadmills, so Frank said, ‘Everyone’s trying to get back to the savannah.’
Diane smiled and nodded. ‘Easy to do.’
‘Is it?’
‘If you know that’s what you’re trying for.’
‘Hmmm. Maybe so. But I don’t think most people know.’
‘No. Hey, are you done there? Will you check me on the bench press? My right elbow kind of locks up sometimes.’
So Frank held the handle bar outside her hand. A young woman, heavily tattooed on her arms, waited for the machine to free up.
Diane finished and Frank held out a hand to help her. She took it and hauled herself up, their grips tightening to hold. When she was up the young woman moved in to replace her, but Diane took up a towel and said, ‘Wait a second, let me wipe up the wet spot.’
‘Oh I hate the wet spot,’ the young woman said, and immediately threw a hand to her mouth, blushing vividly. Frank and Diane laughed, and seeing it the young woman did too, glowing with embarrassment. Diane gave the bench a final flourish and handed it over, saying, ‘There, if only it were always that easy!’
They laughed again and Frank and Diane moved to the next machine. Military press, leg curls; then Diane looked at her watch and said, ‘Oops, I gotta get going,’ and Frank said ‘Me too,’ and without further ado they were off to their respective locker rooms. ‘See you over there.’ ‘Yeah, see you.’
Into the men’s room, the shower, ahhhh. Hot water must have been unusual in the hominid world. Hot springs, the Indian Ocean shallows. Then out on the street, the air still cool, feeling as benign as he had in a long time. And Diane emerged at the same time from the women’s locker room, transformed into work mode, except wetter. They walked over to NSF together, talking about a meeting they were scheduled to attend later in the day. Frank arrived in his office at eight AM as if it were any ordinary morning. He had to laugh.
The meeting featured a presentation by Kenzo and his team to Diane, Frank’s committee, and some of the members of National Science Board, the group that oversaw the Foundation in somewhat a board of directors style, if Frank understood it correctly. By the time Frank arrived, a large false-color map of the North Atlantic was already on the screen. On it the red flows marking the upper reaches of the Gulf Stream broke apart and curled like new ferns, one near Norway, one between Iceland and Scotland, one between Iceland and Greenland, and one extending up the long channel between Greenland and Labrador.
‘This is how it used to look,’ Kenzo said. ‘Now here’s the summer’s data from the Argos buoy system.’
They watched as the red tendrils shrank in on themselves until they nearly met, at about the latitude of southern Ireland. ‘That’s where we’re at now, in terms of temperature. Here’s surface height.’ He clicked to another false-colored map that revealed what were in effect giant shallow whirlpools, fifty kilometers wide but only a few centimeters deep.
‘This is another before map. We think these downwelling sites were pretty stable for the last eight thousand years. Note that the Coriolis force would have the currents turning right, but the land and sea-bottom configurations make them turn left. So they aren’t as robust as they might be. And then, here’s what we’ve got now – see? The downwelling has clearly shifted to southwest of Ireland.’
‘What happens to the water north of that now?’ Diane asked.
‘Well – we don’t know yet. We’ve never seen this before. It’s a fresh water cap, a kind of lens on the surface. In general, water in the ocean moves in kind of blobs of relative freshness or salinity, you might say, blobs that mix only slowly. One team identified and tracked the great salinity anomaly of 1968 to ‘82, that was a huge fresher blob that circled in the North Atlantic on the surface. It made one giant circuit, then sank on its second pass through the downwelling zone east of Greenland. Now with this fresh water cap, who knows? If it’s resupplied from Greenland or the Arctic, it may stay there.’
Diane stared at the map. ‘So what do you think happened to cause this fresh water cap?’
‘It may be a kind of Heinrich event, in which icebergs float south. Heinrich found these by analyzing boulders dropped to the sea floor when the icebergs melted. He theorized that anything that introduces more fresh water than usual to the far North Atlantic will tend to interfere with downwelling there. Even rain can do it. So, we’ve got the Arctic sea ice break-up as the main suspect, plus Greenland is melting much more rapidly than before. The poles are proving to be much more sensitive to global warming than anywhere else, and in the north the effects look to be combining to freshen the North Atlantic. Anyway it’s happened, and the strong implication is that we’re in for a shift to the kind of cold-dry-windy climate that we see in the Younger Dryas.’
‘So.’ Diane looked at the board members in attendance. ‘We have compelling evidence for an ocean event that is the best-identified trigger event for abrupt climate change.’
‘Yes,’ Kenzo said. ‘A very clear case, as we’ll see this winter.’
‘It will be bad?’
‘Yes. Maybe not the full cold-dry-windy, but heck, close enough. The Gulf Stream used to combine with Greenland to make a kind of jet stream anchor, and now the jet stream is likely to wander more, sometimes shooting straight down the continents from the Arctic. It’ll be cold and dry and windy all over the northern hemisphere, but especially in the eastern half of North America, and all over Europe.’ Kenzo gestured at the screen. ‘You can bet on it.’
‘And so … the ramifications? In terms of telling Congress about the situation?’
Kenzo waved his hands in his usual impresario style. ‘You name it! You could reference that Pentagon report about this possibility, which said it would be a threat to national security, as they couldn’t defend the nation from a starving world.’
‘Starving?’
‘Well, there are no food reserves to speak of. I know the food production problem appeared to be solved, at least in some quarters, but there were never any reserves built up. It’s just been assumed more could always be grown. But take Europe – right now it pretty much grows its own food. That’s six hundred and fifty million people. It’s the Gulf Stream that allows that. It moves about a petawatt northward, that’s a million billion watts, or about a hundred times as much energy as humanity generates. Canada, at the same latitude as Europe, only grows enough to feed its thirty million people, plus about double that in grain. They could up it a little if they had to, but think of Europe with a climate suddenly like Canada’s – how are they going to feed themselves? They’ll have a four or five hundred million person shortfall.’
‘Hmm,’ Diane said. ‘That’s what this Pentagon report said?’
‘Yes. But it was an internal document, written by a team led by an Andrew Marshall, one of the missile defense crowd. Its conclusions were inconvenient to the administration and it was getting buried when someone on the team slipped it to Fortune magazine, and they published it. It made a little stir at the time, because it came out of the Pentagon, and the possibilities it outlined were so bad. It was thought that it might influence a vote at the World Bank to change their investment pattern. The World Bank’s Extractive Industries Review Commission had recommended they cut off all future investment in fossil fuels, and move that same money into clean renewables. But in the end the World Bank board voted to keep their investment pattern the same, which was ninety-four percent to fossil fuels and six percent to renewables. After that the Pentagon report experienced the usual fate.’
‘Forgotten.’
‘Yes.’
‘We don’t remember our reports either,’ Edgardo said. ‘There are several NSF reports on this issue. I’ve got one here called “Environmental Science and Engineering for the 21st Century, The Role of the National Science Foundation.” It called for quadrupling the money NSF gave to its environmental programs, and suggested everyone else in government and industry do the same. Look at this table in it – forty-five percent of Earth’s land surface transformed by humans – fifty percent of surface freshwater used – two thirds of the marine fisheries fully exploited or depleted. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere thirty percent higher than before the industrial revolution. A quarter of all bird species extinct.’ He looked up at them over his reading glasses. ‘All these figures are worse now.’
Diane looked at the copy of the page Edgardo had passed around. ‘Clearly ignorance of the situation has not been the problem. The problem is acting on what we know. Maybe people will be ready for that now. Better late than never.’
‘Unless it is too late,’ Edgardo suggested.
Diane had said the same thing to Frank in private, but now she said firmly, ‘Let’s proceed on the assumption that it is never too late. I mean, here we are. So let’s get Sophie in, and prepare something for the White House and the congressional committees. Some plans. Things we can do right now, concerning both the Gulf Stream and global warming more generally.’
‘We’ll need to scare the shit out of them,’ Edgardo said.
‘Yes. Well, the marks of the flood are still all over town. That should help.’
‘People are already fond of the flood,’ Edgardo said. ‘It was an adventure. It got people out of their ruts.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Diane said, with a grimace that was still somehow cheerful or amused. Scaring politicians might be something she looked forward to.
Given all that he had to do at work, Frank didn’t usually get away as early as he would have liked. But the June days were long, and with the treehouse finished there was no great rush to accomplish any particular task. Once in the park, he could wander up the West Ridge Trail and choose where to drop deeper to the east, looking for animals. Just north of Military Road the trail ran past the high point of the park, occupied by the site of Fort DeRussey, now low earthen bulwarks. One evening he saw movement inside the bulwarks, froze: some kind of antelope, its russet coloring not unlike the mounded earth, its neck stretched as it pulled down a branch with its mouth to strip off leaves. White stripes running diagonally up from its white belly. An exotic for sure. A feral from the zoo, and his first nondescript!
It saw him, and yet continued to eat. Its jaw moved in a rolling, side-to-side mastication; the bottom jaw was the one that stayed still. It was alert to his movements, and yet not skittish. He wondered if there were any general feral characteristics, if escaped zoo animals were more trusting or less than the local natives. Something to ask Nancy.
Abruptly the creature shot away through the trees. It was big! Frank grinned, pulled out his FOG phone and called it in. The cheap little cell phone was on something like a walkie-talkie or party line system, and Nancy or one of her assistants usually picked up right away. ‘Sorry, I don’t really know what it was.’ He described it the best he could. Pretty lame, but what could he do? He needed to learn more. ‘Call Clark on phone 12,’ Nancy suggested, ‘he’s the ungulate guy.’ No need to GPS the sighting, being right in the old fort.
He hiked down the trail that ran from the fort to the creek, paralleling Military Road and then passing under its big bridge, which had survived but was still closed. It was nice and quiet in the ravine, with Beach Drive gone and all the roads crossing the park either gone or closed for repairs. A sanctuary.
Green light in the muggy late afternoon. He kept an eye out for more animals, thinking about what might happen to them in the abrupt climate change Kenzo said they were now entering. All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps devastated. That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic; everything would have to go feral.
He walked south on a route that stayed on the rim of the damaged part of the gorge as much as possible. When he came to site 21 he found the homeless guys there as usual, sitting around looking kind of beat.
‘Hey, Doc! Why aren’t you playing frisbee? They ran by just a while ago.’
‘Did they? Maybe I’ll catch them on their way back.’
Frank regarded them; hanging around in the steamy sunset, smoking in their own fire, empties dented on the ground around them. Frank found he was thirsty, and hungry.
‘Who’ll eat pizza if I go get one?’
Everyone would. ‘Get some beer too!’ Zeno said, with a hoarse laugh that falsely insinuated this was a joke.
Frank hiked out to Connecticut and bought thin-crusted pizzas from a little stand across from Chicago’s. He liked them because he thought the owner of the stand was mocking the thick pads of dough that characterized the pizzas in the famous restaurant. Frank was a thin-crust man himself.
Back into the dusky forest, two boxes held like a waiter. Then pizza around the fire, with the guys making their usual desultory conversation. The vet always studying the Post’s federal news section did indeed appear well-versed in the ways of the federal bureaucracy, and he definitely had a chip on his shoulder about it. ‘The left hand don’t know what the right one is doing,’ he muttered again. Frank had already observed that they always said the same things; but didn’t everybody? He finished his slice and crouched down to tend their smoky fire. ‘Hey someone’s got potatoes burning in here.’
‘Oh yeah, pull those out! You can have one if you want.’
‘Don’t you know you can’t cook no potato on no fire?’
‘Sure you can! How you do think?’
Frank shook his head; the potato skins were charred at one end, green at the other. Back in the paleolithic there must have been guys hanging out somewhere beyond the cave, guys who had offended the alpha male or killed somebody by accident or otherwise fucked up – or just not been able to understand the rules – or failed to find a mate (like Frank) – and they must have hunkered around some outlier fire, eating lukewarm pizza and making crude chitchat that was always the same, laughing at their old jokes.
‘I saw an antelope up in the old fort,’ he offered.
‘I saw a tapir,’ the Post reader said promptly.
‘Come on Fedpage, how you know it was a tapir.’
‘I saw that fucking jaguar, I swear.’
Frank sighed. ‘If you report it to the zoo, they’ll put you in their volunteer group. They’ll give you a pass to be in the park.’
‘You think we need a pass?’
‘We be the ones giving them a pass!’
‘They’ll give you a cell phone too.’ That surprised them.
Chessman slipped in, glancing at Frank, and Frank nodded unenthusiastically; he had been about to leave. And it was his turn to play black. Chessman set out the board between them and moved out his king’s pawn.
Suddenly Zeno and Andy were arguing over ownership of the potatoes. It was a group that liked to argue. Zeno was among the worst of these; he would switch from friendly to belligerent within a sentence, and then back again. Abrupt climate change. The others were more consistent. Andy was consistently abrasive with his unfunny humor, but friendly. Fedpage was always shaking his head in disgust at something he was reading. The silent guy with the silky dark red beard was always subdued, but when he spoke always complained, often about the police. Another regular was older, with faded blond-gray hair, pockmarked face, not many teeth. Then there was Jory, an olive-skinned skinny man with greasy black hair and a voice that sounded so much like Zeno’s that Frank at first confused them when listening to their chat. He was if anything even more volatile than Zeno, but had no friendly mode, being consistently obnoxious and edgy. He would not look at Frank except in sidelong glances that radiated hostility.
Lastly among the regulars was Cutter, a cheery, bulky black guy, who usually arrived with a cut of meat to cook on the fire, always providing a pedigree for it in the form of a story of petty theft or salvage. Adventures in food acquisition. He often had a couple of buddies with him, knew Chessman, and appeared to have a job with the city park service, judging by his shirts and his stories. He more than the others reminded Frank of his window-washing days, also the climbing crowd – a certain rowdy quality – life considered as one outdoor sport after the next. It seemed as if Cutter had somewhere else as his base; and he had also given Frank the idea of bringing by food.
Chessman suddenly blew in on the left flank and Frank resigned, shaking his head as he paid up. ‘Next time,’ he promised. The fire guttered out, and the food and beer were gone. The potatoes smoldered on a table top. The guys slowed down in their talk. Redbeard slipped off into the night, and that made it okay for Frank to do so as well. Some of them made their departures into a big production, with explanations of where they were going and why, and when they would likely return again; others just walked off, as if to pee, and did not come back. Frank said, ‘Catch you guys,’ in order not to appear unfriendly, but only as he was leaving, so that it was not an opening to any inquiries.
Off north to his tree. Ladder called down, the motor humming like the sound of his brain in action.
The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spent almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that – even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parcelled out. There were:
1) the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;
2) the people you worked with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;
3) the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week.
4) Then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, or eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full calendar according to Frank’s calculations so far, suggesting they were all living more hours a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety, except you yourself.
One could, therefore:
1) pursue a project in paleolithic living,
2) change the weather,
3) attempt to restructure your profession, and
4) be happy,
all at once, although not simultaneously, but moving from one thing to another, among differing populations; behaving as if a different person in each situation. It could be done, because there were no witnesses. No one saw enough to witness your life and put it all together.
Through the lowest leaves of his tree appeared the aluminum-runged nylon rope ladder. One of his climbing friends had called this kind of ice-climbing ladder a ‘Miss Piggy’, perhaps because the rungs resembled pig iron, perhaps because Miss Piggy had stood on just such a ladder for one of her arias in ‘The Muppets’ Treasure Island.’ Frank grabbed one of the rungs, tugged to make sure all was secure above, and started to climb, still pursuing his train of thought. The parcellated life. Fully optimodal. No reason not to enjoy it; and suddenly he realized that he was enjoying it. It was like being a versatile actor in a repertory theater, shifting constantly from role to role, and all together they made up his life, and part of the life of his time.
Cheered by the thought, he ascended the upper portion of his Miss Piggy, swaying as little as possible among the branches. Then through the gap, up and onto his plywood floor.
He hand-turned the crank on the ladder’s spindle to bring the ladder up after him without wasting battery power. Once it was secured, and the lubber’s hole filled with a fitted piece of plywood, he could relax. He was home.
Against the trunk was his big duffel bag under the tarp, all held in place by bungee cords. From the duffel he pulled the rolled-up foam mattress, as thick and long as a bed. Then pillows, mosquito net, sleeping bag, sheet. On these warm nights he slept under the sheet and mosquito net, and only used his down bag as a blanket near dawn.
Lie down, stretch out, feel the weariness of the day bathe him. Slight sway of the tree: yes, he was up in a treehouse.
The idea made him happy. His childhood fantasy had been the result of visits to the big concrete treehouse at Disneyland. He had been eight years old when he first saw it, and it had bowled him over: the elaborate waterwheel-powered bamboo plumbing system, the bannistered stairs spiraling up the trunk, the big living room with its salvaged harmonium, catwalks to the separate bedrooms on their branches, open windows on all four sides …
His current aerie was a very modest version of that fantasy, of course. Just the basics; a ledge bivouac rather than the Swiss family mansion, and indeed his old camping gear was well-represented around him, augmented by some nifty car-camping extras, like the lantern and the foam mattress and the pillows from the apartment. Stuff scavenged from the wreckage of his life, as in any other Robinsonade.
The tree swayed and whooshed in the wind. He sat on his thick foam pad, his back holding it up against the trunk. Luxurious reading in bed. Around him laptop, cell phone, a little cooler; his backpack held a bathroom bag and a selection of clothing; a Coleman battery-powered lantern. In short, everything he needed. The lamp cast a pool of light onto the plywood. No one would see it. He was in his own space, and yet at the same time right in the middle of Washington D.C. One of the ferals in the ever-encroaching forest. ‘Oooop, oop oop ooooop!’ His tree swayed back and forth in the wind. He switched off his lamp and slept like a babe.
Except his cell phone rang, and he rolled over and answered it without fully waking. ‘Hello?’
‘Frank Vanderwal?’
‘Yes? What time is it?’ And where am I?
‘It’s the middle of the night. Sorry, but this is when I can call.’ As he was recognizing her voice, she went on: ‘We met in that elevator that stuck.’
Already he was sitting up. ‘Ah yeah of course! I’m glad you called.’
‘I said I would.’
‘I know.’
‘Can you meet?’
‘Sure I can. When?’
‘Now.’
‘Okay.’
Frank checked his watch. It was three in the morning.
‘That’s when I can do it,’ she explained.
‘That’s fine. Where?’
‘There’s a little park, near where we first met. Two blocks south of there, a block east of Wisconsin. There’s a statue in the middle of the park, with a bench under it. Would that be okay?’
‘Sure. It’ll take me, I don’t know, half an hour to get there. Less, actually.’
‘Okay. I’ll be there.’
The connection went dead.
Again he had failed to get her name, he realized as he dressed and rolled his sleeping gear under the tarp. He brushed his teeth while putting on his shoes, wondering what it meant that she had called now. Then the ladder finished lowering and down he went, swaying hard and holding on as he banged into a branch. Not a good time to fall, oh no indeed.
On the ground, the ladder sent back up. Leaving the park the streetlights blazed in his eyes, caged in blue polygons or orange globes; it was like crossing an empty stage set. He drove over to Wisconsin and up it, then turned right onto Elm Street. Lots of parking here. And there was the little park she had mentioned. He had not known it existed. It was dark except for one orange streetlight at its north end, near a row of tennis courts. He parked and got out.
Mid-park a small black statue of a female figure held up a black hoop. The streetlight and the city’s noctilucent cloud illuminated everything faintly but distinctly. It reminded Frank of the light in the NSF building on the night of his abortive b-and-e, and he shook his head, not wanting to recall that folly; then he recalled that that was the night they had met, that he had broken into the NSF building specifically because he had decided to stay in D.C. and search for this woman.
And there she was, sitting on the park bench. It was 3:34 AM and there she sat, on a park bench in the dark. Something in the sight made him shiver, and then he hurried to her.
She saw him coming and stood up, stepped around the bench. They stopped face to face. She was almost as tall as he was. Tentatively she reached out a hand, and he touched it with his. Their fingers intertwined. Slender long fingers. She freed her hand and gestured at the park bench, and they sat down on it.
‘Thanks for coming,’ she said.
‘Oh hey. I’m so glad you called.’
‘I didn’t know, but I thought …’
‘Please. Always call. I wanted to see you again.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled a little, as if aware that seeing was not the full verb for what he meant. Again Frank shuddered: who was she, what was she doing?
‘Tell me your name. Please.’
‘… Caroline.’
‘Caroline what?’
‘Let’s not talk about that yet.’
Now the ambient light was too dim; he wanted to see her better. She looked at him with a curious expression, as if puzzling how to proceed.
‘What?’ he said.
She pursed her lips.
‘What?’
She said, ‘Tell me this. Why did you follow me into that elevator?’
Frank had not known she had noticed that. ‘Well! I … I liked the way you looked.’
She nodded, looked away. ‘I thought so.’ A tiny smile, a sigh: ‘Look,’ she said, and stared down at her hands. She fiddled with the ring on her left ring finger.
‘What?’
‘You’re being watched.’ She looked up, met his gaze. ‘Do you know that?’
‘No! But what do you mean?’
‘You’re under surveillance.’
Frank sat up straighter, shifted back and away from her. ‘By whom?’
She almost shrugged. ‘It’s part of Homeland Security.’
‘What?’
‘An agency that works with Homeland Security.’
‘And how do you know?’
‘Because you were assigned to me.’
Frank swallowed involuntarily. ‘When was this?’
‘About a year ago. When you first came to NSF.’
Frank sat back even further. She reached a hand toward him. He shivered; the night seemed suddenly chill. He couldn’t quite come to grips with what she was saying. ‘Why?’
She reached farther, put her hand lightly on his knee. ‘Listen, it’s not like what you’re thinking.’
‘I don’t know what I’m thinking!’
She smiled. The touch of her hand said more than anything words could convey, but right now it only added to Frank’s confusion.
She saw this and said, ‘I monitor a lot of people. You were one of them. It’s not really that big of a deal. You’re part of a crowd, really. People in certain emerging technologies. It’s not direct surveillance. I mean no one is watching you or anything like that. It’s a matter of tracking your records, mostly.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Well – no. E-mail, where you call, expenditures – that sort of thing. A lot of it’s automated. Like with your credit rating. It’s just a kind of monitoring, looking for patterns.’
‘Uh huh,’ Frank said, feeling less disturbed, but also reviewing things he might have said on the phone, to Derek Gaspar for instance. ‘But look, why me?’
‘I don’t get told why. But I looked into it a little after we met, and my guess would be that you’re an associational.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That you have some kind of connection with a Yann Pierzinski.’
‘Ahhhhh?’ Frank said, thinking furiously.
‘That’s what I think, anyway. You’re one of a group that’s being monitored together, and they all tend to have some kind of connection with him. He’s the hub.’
‘It must be his algorithm.’
‘Maybe so. Really I don’t know. I don’t make the determinations of interest.’
‘Who does?’
‘People above me. Some of them I know, and then others above those. The agency is pretty firewalled.’
‘It must be his algorithm. That’s the main thing he’s worked on ever since his doctoral work.’
‘Maybe so. The people I work for use an algorithm themselves, to identify people who should be tracked.’
‘Really? Do you know what kind?’
‘No. I do know that they’re running a futures market. You know what those are?’
Frank shook his head. ‘Like that Poindexter thing?’
‘Yes, sort of. He had to resign, and really he should have, because that was stupid what he was doing. But the idea of using futures markets itself has gone forward.’
‘So they’re betting on future acts of terrorism?’
‘No no. That was the stupid part, putting it like that. There’s much better ways to use those programs. They’re just futures markets, when you design them right. They’re like any other futures market. It’s a powerful way to collate information. They out-perform most of the other predictive methods we use.’
‘That’s hard to believe.’
‘Is it?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, the people I work for believe in them. But the one they’ve set up is a bit different than the standard futures market. It’s not open to anyone, and it isn’t even real money. It’s like a virtual futures market, a simulation. There are these people at MIT who think they have it working really well, and they’ve got some real-world results they can point to. They focus on people rather than events, so really it’s a people futures market, instead of commodities or ideas. So Homeland Security and associated agencies like ours have gotten interested. We’ve got this program going, and now you’re part of it. It’s almost a pilot program, but it’s big, and I bet it’s here to stay.’
‘Is it legal?’
‘It’s hard to say what’s legal these days, don’t you think? At least concerning surveillance. A determination of interest usually comes from the Justice Department, or is approved by it. It’s classified, and we’re a black program that no one on the outside will ever hear about. People who try to publish articles about idea futures markets, or people futures markets, are discouraged from doing so. It can get pretty explicit. I think my bosses hope to keep using the program without it ever causing any fuss.’
‘So there are people betting on who will do innovative work, or defect to China, or like that?’
‘Yes. Like that. There are lots of different criteria.’
‘Jesus,’ Frank said, shaking his head in amazement. ‘But, I mean – who in the hell would bet on me?’
She laughed. ‘I would, right?’
Frank put his hand on top of hers and squeezed it.
‘But actually,’ she said, turning her hand and twining her fingers with his, ‘at this point, I think most of the investors in the market are various kinds of diagnostic programs.’
Now it was Frank’s turn to laugh. ‘So there are computer programs out there, betting I am going to become some kind of a security risk.’
She nodded, smiling at the absurdity of it. Although Frank realized, with a little jolt of internal surprise, that if the whole project were centered around Pierzinski, then the programs might be getting it right. Frank himself had judged that Pierzinski’s algorithm might allow them to read the proteome directly from the genome, thus giving them any number of new gene therapies, which if they could crack the delivery problem had the potential of curing outright many, many diseases. That would be a good in itself, and would also be worth billions. And Frank had without a doubt been involved with Yann’s career, first on his doctoral committee and then running the panel judging his proposal. He had impacted Yann’s career in ways he hadn’t even intended, by sabotaging his application so that Yann had gone to Torrey Pines Generique and then Small Delivery Systems, where he was now.
Possibly the futures market had taken notice of that.
Caroline was now looking more relaxed, perhaps relieved that he was not outraged or otherwise freaked out by her news. He tried to stay cool. What was done was done. He had tried to secure Pierzinski’s work for a company he had ties to, yes; but he had failed. So despite his best (or worst) efforts, there was nothing now he needed to hide.
‘You said MIT,’ he said, thinking things over. ‘Is Francesca Taolini involved with this?’
A surprised look, then: ‘Yes. She’s another subject of interest. There’s about a dozen of you. I was assigned to surveil most of the group.’
‘Did you, I don’t know … do you record what people say on the phone, or in rooms?’
‘Sometimes, if we want to. The technology has gotten really powerful, you have no idea. But it’s expensive, and it’s only fully applied in some cases. Pierzinski’s group – you guys are still under a much less intrusive kind of thing.’
‘Good.’ Frank shook his head, like a dog shaking off water. His thoughts were skittering around in all directions. ‘So … you’ve been watching me for a year. But I haven’t done anything.’
‘I know. But then …’
‘Then what?’
‘Then I saw you on that Metro car, and I recognized you. I couldn’t believe it. I had only seen your photo, or maybe some video, but I knew it was you. And you looked upset. Very … intent on something.’
‘Yes,’ Frank said. ‘That’s right.’
‘What happened? I mean, I checked it out later, but it seemed like you had just been at NSF that day.’
‘That’s right. But I went to a lecture, like I told you.’
‘That’s right, you did. Well, I didn’t know that when I saw you in the Metro. And there you were, looking upset, and so – I thought you might be trailing me. I thought you had found out somehow, done some kind of back trace – that’s another area I’ve been working on, mirror searching. I figured you had decided to confront me, to find out what was going on. It seemed possible, anyway. Although it was also possible it was just one of those freak things that happen in D.C. I mean, you do run into people here.’
‘But then I followed you.’ Frank laughed briefly.
‘Right, you did, and I was standing there waiting for that elevator, thinking: What is this guy going to do to me?’ She laughed nervously, remembering it.
‘You didn’t show it.’
‘No? I bet I did. You didn’t know me. Anyway, then the elevator stuck –’
‘You didn’t stop it somehow?’
‘Heck no, how would I do that? I’m not some kind of a …’
‘James Bond? James Bondette?’
She laughed. ‘It is not like that. It’s just surveillance. Anyway there we were, and we started talking, and it didn’t take long for me to see that you didn’t know who I was, that you didn’t know about being monitored. It was just a coincidence.’
‘But you said you knew I had followed you.’
‘That’s right. I mean, it seemed like you had. But since you didn’t know what I was doing, then it had to be, I don’t know …’
‘Because I liked the way you looked.’
She nodded.
‘Well, it’s true,’ Frank said. ‘Sue me.’
She squeezed his hand. ‘It’s okay. I mean, I liked that. I’m in a kind of a bad … Well anyway, I liked it. And I already liked you, see? I wasn’t monitoring you very closely, but closely enough so that I knew some things about you. I – I had to monitor some of your calls. And I thought you were funny.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. You are funny. At least I think so. Anyway, I’m sorry. I’ve never really had to think about what I do, not like this, not in terms of a person I talk to. I mean – how horrible it must sound.’
‘You spy on people.’
‘Yes. It’s true. But I’ve never thought it has done anybody any harm. It’s a way of looking out for people. Anyway, in this particular case, it meant that I knew you already. I liked you already. And there you were, so, you know … it meant you liked me too.’ She smiled crookedly. ‘That was okay too. Guys don’t usually follow me around.’
‘Yeah right.’
‘They don’t.’
‘Uh huhn. The man who knew too little, watched by the spy who knew even less.’
She laughed, pulled her hand away, punched him lightly on the arm. He caught her hand in his, pulled her to him. She leaned into his chest and he kissed the top of her head, as if to say, I forgive you your job, I forgive the surveillance. He breathed in the scent of her hair. Then she looked up, and they kissed, very briefly; then she pulled away. The shock of it passed through him, waking him up and making him happy. He remembered how it had been in the elevator; this wasn’t like that, but he could tell she remembered it too.
‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Then we did that. You’re a handsome man. And I had figured out why you had followed me, and I felt – oh, I don’t know. I liked you.’
‘Yes,’ Frank said, still remembering the elevator. Feeling the kiss. His skin was glowing.
She laughed again, looking off at her memories. ‘I worried afterward that you would think I was some kind of a loose woman, jumping you like I did. But at the time I just went for it.’
‘Yes you did,’ Frank said.
They laughed, then kissed again.
When they stopped she smiled to herself, pushed her hair off her forehead. ‘My,’ she murmured.
Frank tried to track one of the many thoughts skittering back into his head. ‘You said you were in a kind of a bad?’
‘Ah. Yes. I did.’
The corners of her mouth tightened. She pulled back a bit. Suddenly Frank saw that she was unhappy; and this was so unlike the impression he had gained of her in the elevator that he was shocked. He saw he did not know her, of course he did not know her. He had been thinking that he did, but it wasn’t so. She was a stranger.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I’m married.’
‘Ahh.’
‘And, you know. It’s bad.’
‘Uh oh.’ But that was also good, he thought.
‘I … don’t really want to talk about it. Please. But there it is. That’s where I’m at.’
‘Okay. But … you’re out here.’
‘I’m staying with friends tonight. They live nearby. As far as anyone knows, I’m sleeping on their couch. I left a note in case they get up, saying I couldn’t sleep and went out for a run. But they won’t get up. Or even if they do, they won’t check on me.’
‘Does your husband do surveillance too?’
‘Oh yeah. He’s much further up than I am.’
‘I see.’
Frank didn’t know what to say. It was bad news. The worst news of the night, worse than the fact that he was under surveillance. On the other hand, there she was beside him, and they had kissed.
‘Please.’ She put a hand to his mouth, and he kissed her fingertips. He tried to swallow all his questions.
But some of these questions represented a change of subject, a move to safer ground. ‘So – tell me what you mean exactly when you say surveillance? What do you do?’
‘There are different levels. For you, it’s almost all documentary. Credit cards, phone bills, e-mail, computer files.’
‘Whoah.’
‘Well, hey. Think about it. Physical location too, sometimes. Although mostly that’s at the cell phone records level. That isn’t very precise. I mean, I know you’re staying over off of Connecticut somewhere, but you don’t have an address listed right now. So, maybe staying with someone else. That kind of stuff is obvious. If they wanted to, they could chip you. And your new van has a transponder, it’s GPS-able.’
‘Shit.’
‘Everyone’s is. Like transponders in airplanes. It’s just a question of getting the code and locking on.’
‘My Lord.’
Frank thought it over. There was so much information out there. If someone had access to it, they could find out a tremendous amount. ‘Does NSF know this kind of stuff is going on with their people?’
‘No. This is a black-black.’
‘And your husband, he does what?’
‘He’s at a higher level.’
‘Uh oh.’
‘Yeah. But look, I don’t want to talk about that now. Some other time.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know. Some other time.’
‘When we meet again?’
She smiled wanly. ‘Yes. When we meet again. Right now,’ lighting up her watch and peering at it, ‘shit. I have to get back. My friends will be getting up soon. They go to work early.’
‘Okay … You’ll be okay?’
‘Oh yeah. Sure.’
‘And you’ll call me again?’
‘Yes. I’ll need to pick my times. I need to have a clear space, and be able to call you from a clean phone. There’s some protocols we can establish. We’ll talk about it. We’ll set things up. But now I’ve gotta go.’
‘Okay.’
A peck of a kiss and she was off into the night.
He drove his van back to the edge of Rock Creek Park, sat in the driver’s seat thinking. There was still an hour before dawn. For about half an hour it rained. The sound on the van’s roof was like a steel drum with only two notes, both hit all the time.
Caroline. Married but unhappy. She had called him, she had kissed him. She knew him, in some sense; which was to say, she had him under surveillance. Some kind of security program based on the virtual wagers of some MIT computers, for Christ’s sake. Perhaps that was not as bad as it first sounded. A pro forma exercise. As compared to a bad marriage. Sneaking out at three in the morning. It was hard to know what to feel.
With the first grays of dawn the rain stopped, and he got out and walked into the park. Bird calls of various kinds: cheeps, trills; then a night thrush, its little melodies so outrageous that at first they seemed beyond music, they were to human music as dreams were to art – stranger, bolder, wilder. Birds singing in the forest at dawn, singing, The rain has stopped! The day is here! I am here! I love you! I am singing!
It was still pretty dark, and when he came to the gorge overlook he pulled a little infrared scope he had bought out of his pocket, and had a look downstream to the waterhole. Big red bodies, shimmering in the blackness; they looked like some of the bigger antelopes to Frank, maybe the elands. Those might bring the jaguar out. A South American predator attacking African prey, as if the Atlantic had collapsed back to this narrow ravine and they were all in Gondwanaland together. Far in the distance he could hear the siamangs’ dawn chorus, he assumed; they sounded very far away. Suddenly something inside his chest ballooned like a throat pouch, puffed with happiness, and to himself (to Caroline) he whispered, ‘ooooooooop! oooooooop!’
He listened to the siamangs, and sang under his breath with them, and fitted his digital camera to the night scope to take some IR photos of the drinking animals for FOG. In the growing light he could see them now without the scope. Black on gray. He wondered if the same siamang or gibbon made the first call every morning. He wondered if its companions were lying on branches in comfort, annoyed to be awakened; or if sleeping in the branches was uncomfortable, and all of them thus ready and waiting to get up and move with the day. Maybe this differed with animal, or circumstance – as with people – so that sometimes they snoozed through those last precious moments, before the noise became so raucously operatic that no one could sleep through it. Even at a distance it was a thrilling sound; and now it was the song of meeting Caroline, and he quit trying not to spook the big ungulents at the waterhole and howled. ‘OOOOOOOOP! OoooooooooOOOOOOOOP OOP! OOP!’
He felt flooded. He had never felt like this before, it was some new emotion, intense and wild. No excess of reason for him, not any more! What would the guru say about this? Did the old man ever feel like this? Was this love, then, and him encountering it for the first time, not ever knowing before what it was? It was true she was married. But there were worse entanglements. It didn’t sound like it was going to last. He could be patient. He would wait out the situation. He would have to wait for another call, after all.
Then he saw one of the gibbons or siamangs, across the ravine and upstream, swinging through branches. A small black shape, like a big cat but with very long arms. The classic monkey shape. He caught sight of white cheeks and knew that it was one of the gibbons. White-cheeked gibbons. The whoops had sounded miles away, but they might have been closer all along. In the forest it was hard to judge.
There were more of them, following the first. They flew through the trees like crazy trapeze artists, improvising every swing. Brachiation: amazing. Frank photographed them too, hoping the shots might help the FOG people get an ID. Brachiating through the trees, no plan or destination, just free-forming it through the branches. He wished he could join them and fly like Tarzan, but watching them he knew just what an impossible fantasy that was. Hominids had come down out of the trees, they were no longer arboreal. Tarzan was wrong, and even his treehouse was a throwback.
Upstream the three eland looked up at the disturbance, then continued to drink their fill. Frank stood on the overlook, happily singing his rising glissando of animal joy, ‘oooooooooop!’
And speaking of animals, there was a party at the re-opened National Zoo, scheduled for later that very morning.
The National Zoo, perched as it was on a promontory overlooking a bend in the Rock Creek gorge, had been hammered by the great flood. Lipping over from the north, the surge had rushed down to meet the rise of the Potomac, and the scouring had torn a lot of the fencing and landscaping away. Fortunately most of the buildings and enclosures were made of heavy concrete, and where their foundations had not been undercut, they had survived intact. The National Park system had been able to fund the repairs internally, and given that most of the released animals had survived the flood, and been rounded up afterward rather easily (indeed some had returned to the zoo site as soon as the water subsided), repairs had proceeded with great dispatch. The Friends of the National Zoo, numbering nearly two thousand now, had pitched in with their labor and their collective memory of the park, and the reconstructed version now opening to the public looked very like the original, except for a certain odd rawness.
The tiger and lion enclosure, at the southern end of the park, was a circular island divided into four quadrants, separated by a moat and a high outer wall from the human observers. The trees on the island had survived, although they looked strangely sparse and bedraggled for June.
On this special morning the returning crowd was joined by the Khembali legation, on hand to repeat their swimming tigers’ welcoming ceremony, so ironically interrupted by the flood. The Quiblers were there too, of course; one of the tigers had spent two nights in their basement, and now they felt a certain familial interest.
Anna enjoyed watching Joe as he stood in his backpack on Charlie’s back, happy to be up where he could see properly, whacking Charlie on the sides of the head and shouting ‘Tiger? Tiger?’
‘Yes, tiger,’ Charlie agreed, trying blindly to catch the little fists pummeling him. ‘Our tigers! Swimming tigers!’
A dense crowd surrounded them, ooohing together when the door to the tigers’ inner sanctum opened, and a few moments later the big cats strode out, glorious in the morning sun.
‘Tiger! Tiger!’
The crowd cheered. The tigers ignored the commotion. They padded around on the washed grass, sniffing things. One marked the big tree in their quadrant, protected from claws if not from pee by a new wooden cladding, and the crowd said ‘Ah.’ Nick explained to the people around him that these were Bengal tigers that had been washed out to sea in a big flood of the Brahmaputra, not the Ganges; that they had survived by swimming together for an unknown period of time, and that the Brahmaputra’s name changed to the Tsangpo after a dramatic bend upstream. Anna asked if the Ganges too hadn’t been flooding at least a little bit. Joe jumped up and down in his backpack, nearly toppling forward over Charlie’s head. Charlie listened to Nick, as did Frank Vanderwal, standing behind them among the Khembalis.
Rudra Cakrin gave a small speech, translated by Drepung, thanking the zoo and all its people, and then the Quiblers.
‘Tiger tiger tiger!’
Frank grinned to see Joe’s excitement. ‘Ooooop!’ he cried, imitating the gibbons, which excited Joe even more. It seemed to Anna that Frank was in an unusually good mood. Some of the FONZies came by and gave him a big round button that said FOG on it, and he took another one from them and pinned it to Nick’s shirt. Nick asked the volunteers a barrage of questions about the zoo animals still on the loose, at the same time eagerly perusing the FOG brochure they gave him. ‘Have any animals gotten as far as Bethesda?’
Frank replied for the FONZies, allowing them to move on in their rounds. ‘They’re finding smaller ones all over. They seem to be radiating out the tributary streams from Rock Creek. You can check the website and get all the latest sightings, and track the radio signals from the ones that have been tagged. When you join FOG, you can call in GPS locations for any ferals that you see.’
‘Cool! Can we go and look for some?’
‘I hope so,’ Frank said. ‘That would be fun.’ He looked over at Anna and she nodded, feeling pleased. ‘We could make an expedition of it.’
‘Is Rock Creek Park open yet?’
‘It is if you’re in the FOG.’
‘Is it safe?’ Anna asked.
‘Sure. I mean there are parts of the gorge where the new walls are still unstable, but we would stay away from those. There’s an overlook where you can see the torn-up part and the new pond where a lot of them drink.’
‘Cool!’
The larger of the swimming tigers slouched down to the moat and tested the water with his huge paw.
‘Tiger tiger tiger!’
The tiger looked up. He eyed Joe, tilted back his massive head, roared briefly at what had to be the lowest frequencies audible to humans, or even lower. It was a sound mostly felt in the stomach.
‘Ooooooh,’ Joe said. The crowd said the same.
Frank was grinning with what Anna now thought of as his true smile. ‘Now that’s a vocalization,’ he said.
Rudra Chakrin spoke for a while in Tibetan, and Drepung then translated.
‘The tiger is a sacred animal, of course. He stands for courage. When we are at home, his name is not to be said aloud; that would be bad luck. Instead he is called King of the Mountain, or the Big Insect.’
‘The Big Insect?’ Nick repeated incredulously. ‘That’d just make him mad!’
The larger tiger, a male, padded over to the tree and raked the new cladding, leaving a clean set of claw marks on the fresh wood. The crowd ooohed again.
Frank hooted. ‘Hey, I’m going to go see if I can set the gibbons off. Nick, do you want to join me?’
‘To do what?’
‘I want to try to get the gibbons to sing. I know they’ve recaptured one or two.’
‘Oh, no thanks. I think I’ll stay here and keep watching the tigers.’
‘Sure. You’ll be able to hear the gibbons from here, if they do it.’
Eventually the tigers flopped down in the morning shade and stared into space. The zoo people made speeches as the crowd dispersed through the rest of the zoo. Some pretty vigorous whooping from the direction of the gibbons’ enclosure nevertheless did not sound quite like the creatures themselves. After a while Frank rejoined them, shaking his head. ‘There’s only one gibbon couple that’s been recovered. The rest are out in the park. I’ve seen some of them. It’s neat,’ he told Nick. ‘You’ll like it.’
Drepung came over. ‘Would you join our little party in the visitors’ center?’ he asked Frank.
‘Sure, thanks. My pleasure.’
They walked up the zoo paths together to a building near the entry on Connecticut. Drepung led the Quiblers and Frank to a room in back, and Rudra Cakrin guided them to seats around a round table under a window. He came over and shook Frank’s hand: ‘Hello, Frank. Welcome. Please to meet you. Please to sit. Eat some food, drink some tea.’
Frank looked startled. ‘So you do speak English!’
The old man smiled. ‘Oh yes, very good English. Drepung make me take lessons.’
Drepung rolled his eyes and shook his head. Padma and Sucandra joined them as they passed out sample cups of Tibetan tea. The cross-eyed expression on Nick’s face when he smelled his cup gave Drepung a good laugh. ‘You don’t have to try it,’ he assured the boy.
‘It’s like each ingredient has gone bad in a completely different way,’ Frank commented after a taste.
‘Bad to begin with,’ Drepung said.
‘Good!’ Rudra exclaimed. ‘Good stuff.’
He hunched forward to slurp at his cup. He did not much resemble the commanding figure who had given the lecture at NSF, Anna thought, which perhaps explained why Frank was regarding him so curiously.
‘So you’ve been taking English lessons?’ Frank said. ‘Or maybe it’s like Charlie said? That you spoke English all along, but didn’t want to tell us?’
‘Charlie say that?’
‘I was just joking,’ Charlie said.
‘Charlie very funny.’
‘Yes … so you are taking lessons?’
‘I am scientist. Study English like a bug.’
‘A scientist!’
‘I am always scientist.’
‘Me too. But I thought you said, at your lecture, that rationality wasn’t enough. That an excess of reason was a form of madness.’
Rudra consulted with Drepung, then said, ‘Science is more than reason. More stronger.’ He elbowed Drepung, who elaborated:
‘Rudra Cakrin uses a word for science that is something like devotion. A kind of devotion, he says. A way to honor, or worship.’
‘Worship what, though?’
Drepung asked Rudra, got a reply. ‘Whatever you find,’ he said. ‘Devotion is a better word than worship, maybe.’
Rudra shook his head, looking frustrated by the limited palette of the English language. ‘You watch,’ he said in his gravelly voice, fixing Frank with a glare. ‘Look. If you can. Seems like healing.’
He appealed again to Drepung. A quick exchange in Tibetan, then he forged on. ‘Look and heal, yes. Make better. Make worse, make better. For example, take a walk. Look in. In, out, around, down, up. Up and down. Over and under. Ha ha ha.’
Drepung said, ‘Yes, his English lessons are coming right along.’
Sucandra and Padma laughed at this, and Rudra scowled a mock scowl, so unlike his real one.
‘He seldom sticks with one instructor for long,’ Padma said.
‘Goes through them like tissues,’ Sucandra amplified.
‘Oh my,’ Frank said.
The old man returned to his tea, then said to Frank, ‘You come to our home, please?’
‘Thank you, my pleasure. I hear it’s very close to NSF.’
Rudra shook his head, said something in Tibetan.
Drepung said, ‘By home, he means Khembalung. We are planning a short trip there, and the rimpoche thinks you should join us. He thinks it would be a big instruction for you.’
‘I’m sure it would,’ Frank said, looking startled. ‘And I’d like to see it. I appreciate him thinking of me. But I don’t know how it could work. I’m afraid I don’t have much time to spare these days.’
Drepung nodded. ‘True for all. The upcoming trip is planned to be short for this very reason. That is what makes it possible for the Quibler family also to join us.’
Again Frank looked surprised.
Drepung said, ‘Yes, they are all coming. We plan two days to fly there, four days on Khembalung, two days to get back. Eight days away. But a very interesting week, I assure you.’
‘Isn’t this monsoon season there?’
The Khembalis nodded solemnly. ‘But no monsoon, this year or two previous. Big drought. Another reason to see.’
Frank nodded, looked at Anna and Charlie: ‘So you’re really going?’
Anna said, ‘I thought it would be good for the boys. But I can’t be away from work for long.’
‘Or else her head will explode,’ Charlie said, raising a hand to deflect Anna’s elbow from his ribs. ‘Just joking! Anyway,’ addressing her, ‘you can work on the plane and I’ll watch Joe. I’ll watch him the whole way.’
‘Deal,’ Anna said swiftly.
‘Charlie very funny,’ Rudra said again.
Frank said, ‘Well, I’ll think it over. It sounds interesting. And I appreciate the invitation,’ nodding to Rudra.
‘Thank you,’ Rudra said.
Sucandra raised his glass. ‘To Khembalung!’
‘No!’ Joe cried.
THREE (#ulink_d4980c98-5b71-5040-b135-5f53906d9d02)
Back To Khembalung (#ulink_d4980c98-5b71-5040-b135-5f53906d9d02)
One Saturday Charlie was out on his own, Joe at home with Anna, Nick out with Frank tracking animals. After running some errands he browsed for a bit in Second Story Books, and he was replacing a volume on its shelf when a woman approached him and said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find William Blake?’
Surprised to be taken for an employee (they were all twenty-five and wore black), Charlie stared blankly at her.
‘He’s a poet,’ the woman explained.
Now Charlie was shocked; not only taken for a Second Story clerk, but for the kind who did not know who William Blake was?
‘Poetry’s back there,’ he finally got out, gesturing weakly toward the rear of the store.
The woman slipped past him, shaking her head.
Fire fire burning bright! Charlie didn’t say.
Don’t forget to check the oversized art books for facsimiles of his engravings! he didn’t exclaim.
In fact he’s a lot better artist than poet I think you’ll find! Most of his poetry is trippy gibberish, I think you’ll find! He didn’t shout.
His cell phone rang and he snatched it out of his pocket. William Blake was out of his mind!’
‘Hello, Charlie? Charlie is that you?’
‘Oh hi Phil. Listen, do I look to you like a person who doesn’t know who ‘William Blake was?’
‘I don’t know, do you?’
‘Shit. You know, great arias are lost to the world because we do not speak our minds. Most of our best lines we never say.’
‘I don’t have that problem.’
‘No, I guess you don’t. So what’s up?’
‘I’m following up on our conversation at the Lincoln Memorial.’
‘Oh yeah, good! Are you going to go for it?’
‘I think I will, yeah.’
‘Great! You’ve checked with your money people?’
‘Yes, that looks like it will be okay. There are an awful lot of people who want a change.’
‘That’s for sure. But, you know … do you really think you can win?’
‘Yes, I think so. The feedback I’ve been getting has been positive. But …’
‘But what?’
Phil sighed. ‘I’m worried about what effect it might have on me. I mean – power corrupts, right?’
‘Yes, but you’re already powerful.’
‘So it’s already happened, yes, thank you for that. But it’s supposed to get worse, right? Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Was it William Blake who said that?’
‘That was Lord Acton.’
‘Oh yeah. But he left out the corollary. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and a little bit of power corrupts a little bit.’
‘I suppose that must be so.’
‘And everyone has a little bit of power.’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘So we’re all a little bit corrupt.’
‘Hmm –’
‘Come on, how does that not parse? It does parse. Power corrupts, and we all have power, so we’re all corrupt. A perfect syllogism, if I’m not mistaken. And in fact the only people we think of as not being corrupt are usually powerless. Prisoners of conscience, the feeble-minded, some of the elderly, saints, children –’
‘My children have power.’
‘Yes, but are they perfectly pure and innocent?’
Charlie thought of Joe, faking huge distress when Anna came home from work. ‘No, they’re a little corrupt.’
‘Well there you go.’
‘I guess you’re right. And saints have power but aren’t corrupt, which is why we call them saints. But where does that leave us? That in this world of universal corruption, you might as well be President?’
‘Yes. That’s what I was thinking.’
‘So then it’s okay.’
‘Yes. But the sad part is that the corruption doesn’t just happen to the people with power. It spreads from them. They spread it around. I know this is true because I see it. Every day people come to me because I’ve got some power, and I watch them debase themselves or go silly in some way. I see them go corrupt right before my eyes. It’s depressing. It’s like having the Midas touch in reverse, where everything you touch turns to shit.’
‘The solution is to become saintlike. Do like Lincoln. He had power, but he kept his integrity.’
‘Lincoln could see how limited his power was. Events were out of his control.’
‘That’s true for us too.’
‘Right. Good thought. I’ll try not to worry. But, you know. I’m going to need you guys. I’ll need friends who will tell me the truth.’
‘We’ll be there. We’ll call you on everything.’
‘Good. I appreciate that. Because it’s kind of a bizarre thing to be contemplating.’
‘I’m sure it is. But you might as well go for it. In for a penny in for a pound. And we need you.’
‘You’ll help me with the environmental issues?’
‘As always. I mean, I’ve got to take care of Joe, as you know. But I can always talk on the phone. I’m on call any time – oh for God’s sake here she comes again. Look Phil I’d better get out of here before that lady comes to tell me that Abraham Lincoln was a president.’
‘Tell her he was a saint.’
‘Make him your patron saint and you’ll be fine bye!’
‘That’s bye Mr President.’
Under surveillance.
After he had come down from the euphoria of seeing Caroline, talking to her, kissing her, planning to meet again – Frank was faced with the unsettling reality of her news. Some group in Homeland Security had him under surveillance.
A creepy thought. Not that he had done anything he needed to hide – except that he had. He had tried to sink a young colleague’s grant proposal, in order to secure that work in a private company he had relations with; and the first part of the plan had worked. Not that that was likely to be what they were surveiling him for – but on the other hand, maybe it was. The connection to Pierzinski was apparently why they were interested in him in the first place. Evidence of what he had tried to do – would there be any in the records? Part of the point of him proceeding had been that nothing in what he had done was in contradiction to NSF panel protocols. However, among other actions he was now reviewing, he had made many calls to Derek Gaspar, CEO of Torrey Pines Generique. In some of these he had perhaps been indiscreet.
Well, nothing to be done about that now. He could only focus on the present, and the future.
Thinking about this in his office, Frank stared at his computer. It was connected to the internet, of course. It had virus protections, firewalls, encryption codes; but for all he knew, there were programs more powerful still, capable of finessing all that and probing directly into his files. At the very least, all his e-mail. And then phone conversations, sure. Credit rating, sure, bank records, all other financial activity – all now data for analysis by participants in some kind of virtual futures market, a market trading in newly emerging ideas, technologies, researchers. All speculated on, as with any other commodity. People as commodities – well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
He went out to a local cyber-cafe and paid cash to get on one of the house machines. Seating himself before it with a triple espresso, he looked around to see what he could find.
The first sites that came up told the story of the case of the Policy Analysis Market proposal, which had blown up in the face of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, some time before. John Poindexter, of Iran-Contra fame, had set up a futures market in which participants could bet on potential events in the Middle East, including possibilities like terrorist attacks and assassinations. Within a week of announcing the project Poindexter had been forced to resign, and DARPA had cut off all funds not just for the PAM project, but for all research into markets as predictive tools. There were protests about this at the time, from various parties convinced that markets could be powerful predictors, distilling as they did the collective information and wisdom of many people, all putting their money where their mouths were. Different people brought different expertise to the table, it was claimed, and the aggregated information was thought to be better able to predict future performance of the given commodity than any individual or single group could.
This struck Frank as bullshit, but that was neither here nor there. Certainly the market fetishists who dominated their culture would not give up on such an ideologically correct idea just because of a single public relations gaffe. And indeed, Frank quickly came on news of a program called ARDA, Advanced Research and Development Activity, which had become home to both the Total Information Awareness program and the ideas future market. ARDA had been funded as part of the ‘National Foreign Intelligence Program,’ which was part of an intelligence agency that had not been publicly identified. ‘Evidence Extraction,’ ‘Link Discovery,’ ‘Novel Intelligence from Massive Data’; all kinds of data-mining projects had disappeared with the futures market idea down this particular rabbit hole.
Before it left public view along with the rest of this kind of thing, the idea futures market concept had already been fine-tuned to deal with first iteration problems. ‘Conditional bidding’ allowed participants to nuance their wagers by making them conditional on intermediary events. And – this jumped out at Frank as he read – ‘market makers’ were added to the system, meaning automated bidders that were always available to trade, so that the market would stay liquid even when there were few participants. The first market maker programs had lost tremendous amounts of money, so their programmers had refined them to a point where they were able to compete successfully with live traders.
Bingo. Frank’s investors.
The whole futures market concept had then gone black, along with ARDA itself. Wherever it was now, it undoubtedly included these programs that could trade in the futures of researchers and their ideas, predicting which would prosper by using the collective pooling of information envisioned in the Total Information Awareness concept, which had dreamed of collating all the information everywhere in the datasphere.
So: virtual markets, with virtual participants, creating virtual results, tracked by real people in real security agencies. All part of the newly secure environment as envisioned in the Homeland Security acts. That these people had chosen a Nazi title for their enterprise was presumably more a tribute to their ignorance and stupidity than to any evil intent. Nevertheless it was not reassuring.
Briefly Frank wondered if he could learn enough to do some reverse transcription, and use this system against itself. Google-bombing was one method that had successfully distorted the datasphere, placing information in ways that caused it to radiate out through the system inaccurately. That particular method had been countered by blockers, but other methods remained out there, using the cascading recombinant math that was part of the algorithm family that both Frank and Yann Pierzinski studied. Pierzinski was the young hotshot, blazing out into new territory; but it was Frank who had recognized what his newly powerful algorithm might do in the real world. Now maybe he had identified another potential application. Yann never would; he was one of those mathematicians who just didn’t care about other stuff. There were theorists and there were engineers, and then there were the few who straddled the two realms, identifying the theories that were most likely to bear fruit in real-world accomplishment, and could suggest to engineering types how they might go about implementing things. That was Frank’s ability as he saw it, and now he wondered how one might formulate the problem for a mathematician, and then an engineering team …
Frank almost called Edgardo, as a fellow realm-straddler, to ask him what he knew; because among other factors, Edgardo had come to NSF from DARPA. DARPA was like NSF, in that it staffed itself mostly with visiting scientists, although DARPA stints were usually three to four years rather than one or two. Edgardo, however, had only lasted there a year. He had never said much about why, only once remarking that his attitude had not been appreciated. Certainly his views on this surveillance matter would be extremely interesting –
But of course Frank couldn’t call him. Even his cell phone might be bugged; and Edgardo’s too. Suddenly he recalled that workman in his new office, installing a power strip. Could a power strip include a splitter that would direct all data flowing through it in more than one direction? And a mike and so on?
Probably so. He would have to talk to Edgardo in person, and in a private venue. Running with the lunchtime runners would give him a chance at that; the group often strung out along the paths.
He needed to know more. Already he wished Caroline would call again. He wanted to talk to everyone implicated in this: Yann Pierzinski – meaning Marta too, which would be hard, terrible in fact, but Marta had moved to Atlanta with Yann and they lived together there, so there would be no avoiding her. And then Francesca Taolini, who had arranged for Yann’s hire by a company she consulted for, in the same way Frank had hoped to. Did she suspect that Frank had been after Yann? Did she know how powerful Yann’s algorithm might be?
He googled her. Turned out, among many interesting things, that she was helping to chair a conference at MIT coming soon, on bioinformatics and the environment. Just the kind of event Frank might attend. NSF even had a group going already, he saw, to talk about the new federal institutes.
Meet with her first, then go to Atlanta to meet with Yann – would that make his stock in the virtual market rise, triggering more intense surveillance? An unpleasant thought; he grimaced.
He couldn’t evade most of this surveillance. He had to continue to behave as if it wasn’t happening. Or rather, treat his actions as also being experiments in the sensitivity of the surveillance. Visit Taolini and Pierzinski, sure, and see if that gave his stock a bump. Though he would need detailed information from Caroline to find out anything about that.
He e-mailed the NSF travel office and had them book him flights to Boston and back. A day trip ought to do it.
Some mornings he woke to the sound of rain ticking onto his roof and the leaves. Dawn light, muted and wet; he lay in his sleeping bag watching grays turn silver. His roof extended far beyond the edges of his plywood floor. When he had all the lines and bungee cords right, the clear plastic quivered tautly in the wind, shedding its myriad deltas of water. Looking up at it, Frank lay comfortably, entirely dry except for that ambient damp that came with rain no matter what one did. Same with all camping, really. But mostly dry; and there he was, high in the forest in the rain, in a rain forest canopy, encased in the splashing of a million drips, and the wet whoosh of the wind in the branches, remaining dry and warm watching it all. Yes, he was an arboreal primate, lying on his foam pad half in his sleeping bag, looking through an irregular bead curtain of water falling from the edge of his roof. A silvery green morning.
Often he heard the other arboreal primates, greeting the day. These days they seemed to be sleeping on the steep slope across the creek from him. The first cry of the morning would fill the gorge, low and liquid at first, a strange cross between siren and voice. It never failed to send a shiver down his spine. That was something hardwired. No doubt the hominid brain included a musical capacity that was not the same as its language capacity. These days people tended to use their musical brains only for listening, thus missing the somatic experience of making it. With that gone the full potential of the experience was lost. ‘Oooooop!’ Singing, howling; it all felt so good. ‘Ooooh-oooooooooooo-da.’
Something else to consider writing about. Music as primate precursor to language. He would add it to his list of possible papers, already scores if not hundreds of titles long. He knew he would never get to them, but they ought to be written.
He had extended his roof to cover the cut in the railing and floor through which he dropped onto his rope ladder, and so he was able to descend to the ground without getting very wet. Onto the forest floor, not yet squishy, out to his van, around D.C. on the Beltway, making the first calls of the day over his headset. Stop in at Optimodal, singing under his breath, ‘I’m optimodal, today – optimodal, today!’ Into the weight room, where, it being six AM, Diane was working on one of the leg machines. Familiar hellos, a bit of chat about the rain and her morning calls, often to Europe to make use of the time difference. It was turning out to be a very cool summer in Europe, and rainstorms were being welcomed as signs of salvation; but the environmental offices there were full of foreboding.
Shower, change, walk over to NSF with Diane. Amazing how quickly people developed sets of habits. They could not do without them, Frank had concluded. Even his improvised life was full of them. It might be said that now he had an array of habits that he had to choose from, a kind of menu. Up to his office, check phone messages and e-mail, get coffee, start on the messages that needed action, and the making of a daily Things To Do list out of the standing one on the whiteboard. Bit of breakfast when his stomach reminded him it was being neglected.
One of his Things To Do was to attend another of Diane’s meetings late that morning, this one attended by various division heads, including Anna, and some members of the Science Board.
Diane had been busy organizing her own sense of the climate problem, structuring it in the broadest terms possible. First, however, she had some good news to share; the appropriations committees in Congress had streamlined approval of two billion dollars for NSF to engage with climate issues as soon as possible. ‘They want us to take action, they said, but in a strictly scientific manner.’
Edgardo snorted. ‘They want a silver bullet. Some kind of technical fix that will make all the problems go away without any suffering on Wall Street.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Diane said. ‘They’re funding us, and we’ll be making the determinations as to what might work.’
She clicked to the first of her Power Point pages. ‘Okay. Global environmental problem, having to do with habitat degradation and a hundred parts per million rise in atmospheric carbon, resulting in species loss and food insecurity. You can divide it into land, ocean, and atmosphere. On land, we have loss of topsoil, desertification, and in some places, flooding. In the oceans, we have sea level rise, either slow because of general warming, already happening, or else fast, as a result of the West Antarctic ice sheet detaching. Probability of the Antarctic ice sheet coming off is very hard to calculate. Then also thermohaline circulation, in particular the North Atlantic stall in the great world current. Also fisheries depletion, also coral reef loss. The oceans are more of a source of trouble than we’re used to thinking. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide build-up of course, very well known, but also methane and other more powerful greenhouse gases.’
She clicked to the next slide. ‘Let’s start with atmosphere, particularly the carbon dioxide aspect. Now up to 400 parts per million, from 280 before the industrial revolution. Clearly, we need to slow down how much CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere, despite the industrialization of China, India, and many other places. Then also, it would be interesting to see if we could remove and sequester from the atmosphere any significant amounts of CO2 that are already up there. Drawdown studies, these are sometimes called.
‘What’s putting carbon into the atmosphere? The bulk of it comes from energy production and cars. We’ve been burning fossil fuels to create electricity and to move us and our stuff around. If we had cleaner technologies to create electricity and to power transport, we would put less carbon in the air. So, we need cleaner cars and cleaner energy production. There’s been a lot of work done on both fronts, with some very exciting possibilities explored, but bottom line, the oil and car industries are very big, and they work together to obstruct research and development of cleaner technologies that might replace them. Partly because of their lobbying here in D.C., research into cleaner technologies is under-funded, even though some of the new methods show real promise. Some are even ready to go, and could make a difference very rapidly, but are still too expensive to compete financially, especially given the initial costs in installing a new infrastructure, whatever it might be.
‘So. Given this situation, I think we have to identify the two or three most promising options in each big carbon area, energy and transport, and then immediately support these options in a major way. Pilot projects, maybe competitions with prizes, certainly suggested tax structures and incentives to get private enterprise investing in it.’
‘Make carbon credits really expensive,’ Frank said.
‘Make gas really expensive,’ Edgardo said.
‘Yes. These are more purely economic or political fixes. We will run into political resistance on those.’
‘You’ll run into political resistance on all these fronts.’
‘Yes. But we have to work for everything that looks like it will help, political resistance or not. More and more I’m convinced that this will have to be a multi-disciplinary effort, in the largest sense. The front is very broad, and we can’t avoid the awkward parts just because they’ve got difficulties. I was just mentioning them.’
She clicked to her next slide. ‘Cars. It takes about ten years to replace the fleet of cars on the road, so we need to start now if anything is to be done in a relevant time period. Fuel cell cars, electric, hydrogen. Also, there are some things we could do right away with the current models. Increase fuel efficiency, of course. Could be legislated. Also, fuel flexibility. There is a device that could be added to every conventional car that would enable it to burn gas, ethanol or methanol. Adds only a couple hundred dollars per vehicle. It too could be legislated to be a requirement. This would have a national security aspect, which is to say, if we are unexpectedly cut off from foreign oil supplies, everyone could still burn ethanol in their cars, and we wouldn’t be completely crippled.’
‘Ethanol still puts carbon into the atmosphere,’ Frank pointed out.
‘Yes, but it’s made from biological material that has been drawn down from the atmosphere when the plant material grew. On the plant’s death it was going to rot and enter the atmosphere as carbon anyway. If you burn it and put it in the atmosphere, you can then also draw it back down in the plants that you use for later fuel, so that it becomes a closed-loop system where there is no net gain of carbon in the atmosphere, even though you have moved lots of transport. Whereas burning oil and coal adds new carbon to the atmosphere, carbon that was very nicely sequestered before we burned it. So ethanol is better, and it’s available right now, and works in current cars. Most of the other technologies for cleaner power are a decade away in terms of research and development. So it’s nice that we have something we can deploy immediately. A bridge technology. Clearly this should happen right now.’
‘If it weren’t for the political obstructions.’
‘Yes. Maybe this is an issue where we have to try to educate Congress, the administration and the people. Think about how we might do that. But now, on to cleaner energy production.’ Diane clicked slides again. ‘Here again we already have proven options, in the form of all the renewables, many of them working and ready to be expanded. Wind, geothermal, solar, and so on.
‘The one with tremendous potential for growth is of course solar power. The technological difficulties in transferring sunlight to electricity are complicated enough that there are competing designs for improvement, still struggling to show superiority over the other methods. So one thing we can do is to help identify which ones to pursue with a big effort. Photovoltaic research, of course, but also we need to look at these flexible mirror systems, directing light to heatable elements that transform the heat into electricity. Further down the line, there is also the prospect of space solar, gathering the sunlight in space and beaming it down.’
‘Wouldn’t that require help from NASA?’
‘Yes, NASA should be part of this. A really big booster is a prerequisite for any conceivable space solar, naturally.’
‘And what about DOE?’
‘Well, perhaps. We have to acknowledge that some federal agencies have been captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate. Clearly the Department of Energy is one of these. They should have been taking the lead on clean energy, but they began as the Atomic Energy Commission, so for a while they would only look at nuclear, and now they are creatures of the oil industry. So they have been obstructions to innovation for many years. Whether that can change now, I don’t know. I suspect the only good that can come from them is some version of clean coal. If coal can be gasified, it’s possible its carbon and methane could be captured and sequestered before burning. That would be good, if they can pull it off. But beyond that, the unfortunate truth is that DOE is more likely to be one of the impediments to our efforts than a help. We will have to do what we can to engage them, and dance around any obstacles they might set up.’
She clicked again. ‘Now, carbon capture and sequestering. Here, the hope is that ways can be found to draw down some of the CO2 already in the atmosphere. That could be a big help, obviously. There are proven mechanical means to do this, but the scale of anything we could afford to build is much too small. If anything’s going to work, it almost certainly will have to be biological. The first and most obvious method here is to grow more plants. Reforestation projects are thus helpful in more ways than one, as stabilizing soil, restoring habitat, growing energy, and growing building materials, all while drawing down carbon. Poplars are often cited as very fast growers with a significant drawdown possibility.
‘The other biological method suggested would involve some hypothetical engineered biological system taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than it does now. This brings biotech into the game, and it could be a crucial player. It might have the possibility of working fast enough to help us in the short term.’
For a while they discussed the logistics of initiating all the efforts Diane had sketched out so far, and then Anna took over the Power Point screen.
She said, ‘Another carbon sequestration, in effect, would be to not burn oil that we would have using our current practices. Meaning conservation. It could make a huge difference. Since the United States is the only country living at American consumption levels, if we here decided to consume less, it would significantly reduce world consumption levels.’
She clicked to a slide titled Carbon Values. It consisted of a list of phrases:
• conservation, preservation (fuel efficiency, carbon taxes)
• voluntary simplicity
• stewardship, right action (religion)
• sustainability, permaculture
• leaving healthy support system for the subsequent generations
Edgardo was shaking his head. ‘This amishization, as the engineers call it – you know, this voluntary simplicity movement – it is not going to work. Not only are we fond of our comforts and toys, and lazy too, but there is a fifty billion dollar a year industry fighting any such change, called advertising.’
Anna said, ‘Maybe we could hire an advertising firm to design a series of voluntary simplicity ads, to be aired on certain cable channels.’
Edgardo grinned. ‘Yes, I would enjoy to see that, but there is a ten trillion-a-year economy that also wants more consumption. It’s like we’re working within the body of a cancerous tumor. It’s hopeless, really. We will simply charge over the cliff like lemmings.’
‘Real lemmings don’t actually run off cliffs,’ Anna quibbled. ‘People might change. People change all the time. It just depends on what they want.’
She had been looking into this matter, which she jokingly called macrobioinformatics: researching, refining and even inventing various rubrics by which people could evaluate their consumption levels quantitatively, with the idea that if they saw exactly what they were wasting, they would cut back and save money. The best known of these rubrics, as she explained, were the various ‘ecological footprint’ measurements. These had been originally designed for towns and countries, but Anna had worked out methods for households as well, and now she passed around a chart illustrating one method, with a statistical table that illustrated her earlier point that since Americans were the only ones in the world living at American consumption levels, any reduction here would disproportionately shrink the total world footprint.
‘The whole thing should be translated into money values at every step,’ Edgardo said. ‘Put it in the best way everyone in this culture can understand, the cost in dollars and cents. Forget the acreage stuff. People don’t know what an acre is anymore, or what you can expect to extract from it.’
‘Education, good,’ Diane said. ‘That’s already part of our task as defined. And it will help to get the kids into it.’
Edgardo cackled. ‘Okay, maybe they will go for it, but also the economists should be trying to invent an honest accounting system that doesn’t keep exteriorizing costs. When you exteriorize costs onto future generations you can make any damn thing profitable, but it isn’t really true. I warn you, this will be one of the hardest things we might try. Economics is incorrigible. They call it the dismal science but actually it’s the happy religion.’
Frank tended to agree with Edgardo’s skepticism about these kinds of social interventions; and his own interests lay elsewhere, in the category Diane had labeled ‘Mitigation Projects.’ Now she took back the Power Point from Anna and clicked to a list which included several of the suggestions Frank had made to her earlier:
1) establishing one or more national institutes for the study of abrupt climate change and its mitigation, analogous to Germany’s Max Planck Institutes.
2) establishing grants and competitions designed to identify and fund mitigation work judged crucial by NSF.
3) reviewing the already existing federal agencies to find potentially helpful projects they had undertaken or proposed, and coordinate them.
All good projects, but it was the next slide, ‘Remedial Action Now,’ that was the most interesting to Frank. One of the obvious places to start here was with the thermohaline circulation stall. Diane had gotten a complete report from Kenzo and his colleagues at NOAA, and her tentative conclusion was that the great world current, though huge, was sensitive in a nonlinear way to small perturbations. Which meant it might respond sensitively to small interventions if they could be directed well.
So, Diane concluded, this had to be investigated. How big a sea surface was critical to downwelling? How precisely could they pinpoint potential downwelling sites? How big a volume of water were they talking about? If they needed to make it saltier in order to force it to start sinking again, how much salt were they talking about? Could they start new downwellings in the north where they used to happen?
Kenzo’s eyes were round. He met Frank’s gaze, waggled his eyebrows like Groucho. Pretty interesting stuff!
‘We have to do something,’ Diane declared, without glancing at Frank. He thought: she’s been convinced. I was at least part of that. ‘The Gulf Stream is an obvious place to look at remediation, but there are lots of other ideas for direct intervention, and they need to be evaluated and prioritized according to various criteria – cost, effectiveness, speed, all that.’
Edgardo grinned. ‘So – we are going to become global biosphere managers. We are going to terraform the Earth!’
‘We already are,’ Diane replied. ‘The problem is we don’t know how.’
Later that day Frank joined the noon running group, going with Edgardo and Kenzo down to the gym to dress and join Bob and Clark, from the Antarctic program on the seventh floor. The group was sometimes larger than this, sometimes smaller. They ran various routes, usually on old rail beds now converted into bike and running trails all through the area. Their usual lunchtime special ran parallel to Route 66 east for a while, then back around the curve of the Potomac and west back to NSF.
They ran at talking speed, which for this group meant about an eight-minute mile pace. A lot of the talking came from Edgardo, riffing on one thing or another. He liked to make connections; he liked to question things. He didn’t believe in anything. Even the scientific method was to him a kind of ad hoc survival attempt, a not-very-successful concoction of emergency coping mechanisms. Which belief did not, however, keep him from working maniacally on every project thrown his way, nor from partying late almost every night at various Latin venues. He was from Buenos Aires originally, and this, he said, explained everything about him. ‘All of us porteños are the same.’
‘There’s no one like you, Edgardo,’ Bob pointed out.
‘On the contrary. In Buenos Aires everyone is like me. How else could we survive? We’ve lived the end of the world ten times already. What to do after that? You just put Piazzolla on the box and dance on, my friend. You laugh like a fool.’
You certainly do, Frank didn’t say. Of course Edgardo also did mathematics with applications in quantum computing, cryptology, and bio-algorithms, the last of which was the only aspect of his work that Frank understood. It was clear to him that at DARPA Edgardo must have had his fingers in all kinds of pies, subjects that Frank was much more interested in now than he had ever been before.
Where it paralleled Highway 66 the running path became a thin concrete walk immediately north of the freeway, between the cars and the soundwall, with only a chain link fence separating them from the roaring traffic to their right. The horribleness of it always made Edgardo grin. At midday when they usually ran it was totally exposed to the sun, but there was nothing for it but to put your head down and sweat through the smog.
‘You really should run with an umbrella hat on like I do.’ Edgardo looked ridiculous with this tall contraption on his saturnine head, but he claimed it kept him cool.
‘That’s what hair is for, right?’
‘Male pattern baldness has taken that away as an option for me, as I am sure you have noticed.’
‘Wouldn’t that make baldness maladaptive?’
‘Maladaptive in more ways than heat control, my friend.’
‘Did you read that book, Why We Run? Explains how everything about us comes from adaptations to running? Even hair staying on the tops of our heads?’
Edgardo made a rude noise. ‘Why We Run, Why We Love, Why We Reason, all these are the same, they are simply titles for the bestseller list.’
‘Why We Run was good,’ Frank objected. ‘It had stuff on the physiology of endurance. And it talked about how lots of native peoples ran animals down, over a matter of several days, even deer and antelope. The animals were faster, but the chase group would keep on pounding away until they wore the animals out.’
‘Tortoise and hare.’
‘I’m definitely a tortoise.’
‘I’m going to write one called Why We Shit,’ Edgardo declared. ‘I’ll go into all the details of digestion, and compare ours to other species, and describe all the poisons we take in and then have to process or pass through, or get poisoned by. By the time I’m done no one will ever want to eat again.’
‘So it could be the next diet book too.’
‘That’s right! Atkins, South Beach, and me. The Alfonso Diet. Eat nothing but information! Digest that for once and never shit at all.’
‘Like on Atkins, right?’
They left 66 for the river, passed through trees, and then the sun beat down on them again.
‘What did you think of Diane’s meeting?’ Frank asked Edgardo when they were bringing up the rear.
‘That was pretty good,’ Edgardo said. ‘Diane is really going for it. Whoever heads these agencies can make a lot of difference in how they function, I think. There are constraints on what each agency does, and the turf battles are fierce. But if an agency head were to get an idea and go after it aggressively, it could get interesting. So it’s good to have her pushing. What’s going to surprise her is what vicious opposition she’s going to get from certain other agencies. There are people out there really committed to the status quo, let us say.’
They caught up with Bob and Kenzo and Clark, who were discussing the various odd climate interventions they had heard proposed.
Bob said, ‘I like the one about introducing a certain bacterial agent to animal feed that would then live in the gut and greatly reduce methane production.’
‘Animal Flatulence Avoidance Feed! AF AF – the sound of Congress laughing when they hear about that one.’
‘But it’s a good idea. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and it’s mostly biologic in origin. It wouldn’t be much different than putting vitamin A in soy sauce. They’ve done that and saved millions of kids from rickets. How is it different?’
They laughed at Bob, but he was convinced that if they acted boldly, they could alter the climate deliberately and for the good. Kenzo wasn’t so sure; Edgardo didn’t think so.
‘Just think of it as something like the Manhattan Project,’ Bob said. ‘A war against disaster. Or like Apollo.’
Edgardo was his usual acid bath. ‘I wonder if you are fantasizing physically or politically.’
‘Well we obviously can change the atmosphere, because we have.’
‘Yes, but now we’ve triggered abrupt change. Global warming is a problem that could have taken centuries to fix, and now we have three years.’
‘Maybe less!’ Kenzo bragged.
‘Well, heck,’ Bob said, unperturbed. ‘It’ll be a matter of making things up as we go along.’
Frank liked the sound of that.
They ran in silence for a while. Fleeting consciousness of the pack; immersion in the moment. Slipping slickly in your own sweat.
‘Hotter than hell out here.’
After these runs Frank would shower and spend the afternoons working, feeling sharper than at any other time of the day. Mornings were for talking and prepping, afternoons were for work. Even algorithm work, where the best he could do these days was try to understand Yann’s papers, now growing scarcer as Small Delivery made his work confidential.
There was always more to do than there was time to get it done, so he pitched in to the items on the list and set his watch’s alarm for five, a trick he had picked up from Anna, so he would not forget and work deep into the evening. Then he cranked until it beeped. These hours disappeared in a subjective flow where they felt like minutes.
More work was accomplished than there is time to tell, ranging from discussions in house to communications with other people in other organizations, to the endless Sisyphean labor of processing jackets, which is what they called the grant proposals, never mind they were all onscreen now. No matter how high in the Foundation a person got, and no matter how important his or her other tasks might be, there was always the inevitable question from above: how many jackets did you process today? And so really there was no conceivable end to the work that could be done. Given Diane’s interests now, there could never be enough networking with the outside world, and this of course brought Frank news of what everyone else was doing; and sometimes in the afternoons, first listening to a proposal to genetically engineer kelp to produce bulbs filled with ready-to-burn carbohydrates, then talking for an hour with the UNEP officer in town to plan a tidal energy capture system that placed a barge on a ratcheted piling in the tidal zone, then conferring with a group of NGO science officers concerning the Antarctic microwave project, and then speaking to people in an engineering consortium of government/university/industry groups about cheap efficient photovoltaics, he would come out of it to the high beeping of his watch alarm, dizzy at the touch of the technological sublime, feeling that a good array of plans existed already – that if they could enact this array, it would go a long way toward averting catastrophe. Perhaps they were already in the process of doing so. It was actually hard to tell; so much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from ‘desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored’ to ‘minor problems robustly dealt with.’ It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation.
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