Fifty Degrees Below

II. ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE

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 clearcut 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 cliff, 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 a pair 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.

Hast 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 gray 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 tree-house 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 bandanna, 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 lineman’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 Health Club 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 nonathletes 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 handlebar 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 a.m. 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 the 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 twenty-first 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 fresh water 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 do you 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.

Last 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:

One could, therefore:

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 tree house.

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.

Midpark 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 a.m. 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 outperform 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,” be 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 huh. 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 ungulates 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 tree house was a throwback.

Upstream the three elands 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 Quibler 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 Cakrin 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 mat’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.