Fifty Degrees Below

V. AUTUMN IN NEW YORK

The most beautiful regatta in the history of the world convened that year on Midsummer Day, at the North Pole.

The sun hung in the same spot all day long, blazing down on open water that appeared more black than blue. A few icebergs floated here and there, most low and white, but including a few dolmens of jade or turquoise, standing in an obsidian sea.

Among these floating extravaganzas sailed or motored some three hundred boats and ships. Sails were of every cut and color, some even prisming through the spectrum as they bent to the shifts of the mild southern breeze. People said the prisming sails allowed one to see every gust’s impact in a manner never possible before. That it also looked cool was too obvious to mention. All manner of sail, all possible rigs and hulls: catamarans and schooners, yawls, ketches, trimarans; also square-riggers, from caravels to clipper ships to newfangled experiments obviously not destined to prosper; a quintet of huge Polynesian outriggers; and every manner of motor launch, rumbling unctuously through the sails, each sporting a unique profile in white or cream; and a lot of single-person craft, including many kayakers and windsurfers in black drysuits.

The larger fleet jockeyed until their navigators linked up and devised a kind of spiral galaxy formation, centered on the pole and rotating clockwise if seen from above. Everyone thus sailed west together, following the two simple rules that birds use when flocking in a gyre: change speeds as little as possible, keep as far apart from everyone else as possible.

Senator Phil Chase smiled happily when the flocking rubric was explained to him. “That’s the Senate for you,” he said. “Or maybe it’s all you need to get by in life.”

By a happy coincidence, the North Pole itself, as determined by GPS, was marked for the day by a tall aquamarine iceberg that had drifted over it. In the immediate vicinity of this newly-identified “Pole Berg” idled many of the largest ships in the fleet, ranging from small cruise ships to huge private yachts, with a few old icebreakers on hand as well, looking overweight and unwanted.

This was the fifth midsummer festival at the Pole. Every year since lanes of water had opened in the summer Arctic ice, a larger and larger group of sea craft had sailed or motored north to party at the pole. The gatherings had a Burning Man festival aspect to them, the sybaritic excess and liberal shooting off of fireworks leading many to call it Drowning Man, or Freezing-Your-Butt-Man.

This year, however, the party had been somewhat taken over by the Inuit nation Nunavut, in conjunction with the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, who had declared this “The Year of Global Environmental Awareness,” and sent out hundreds of invitations, and provided many ships themselves, in the hope of gathering a floating community that would emphasize to all the world the undeniable changes already wrought by global warming. The organizers were willing to accept the risk of making the gathering look like a party, or even God forbid a celebration of global warming in order to garner as much publicity as possible. Of course a whole new ocean to sail on was no doubt an exciting thing for sailors, but all that missing winter ice was floating down into the North Atlantic at that very moment, changing everything. IPCC wanted people to see with their own eyes that abrupt climate change was already upon them, and that it could soon cast the entire world into thousands of years of bad weather, as it had during the Younger Dryas just eleven thousand years before.

But of course there were many people there who did not regard the polar party in its official light, just as there were many in the world who did not worry overmuch about entering the Youngest Dryas. On the sail up to the festival, some of them had encountered an oil tanker, only slightly smaller than the ULCCs (Ultra Large Crude Carriers) of the late twentieth century, double-hulled, as was legally required, and making a dry run on a great circle route from Japan to Norway that passed near the pole. This voyage was demonstrating that the Northwest Passage was open for business at last; and better late than never. Oil could be shipped directly from the North Sea to Japan, cutting the distance by two-thirds. Even if oil was passé, post-peak, old paradigm and all the rest, Japan and the North Sea oil countries were nevertheless awfully pleased to be able to move it over the Pole. They were not ashamed to admit that the world still needed oil, and that while it did, there would be reasons to appreciate certain manifestations of global warming. Shipyards in Glasgow, Norway, and Japan had been revitalized, and were now busy building a new class of Arctic Sea tankers to follow this prototype, boldly going where no tanker had gone before.

And here at the Pole itself, on Midsummer Day, things looked fine. The world was beautiful, the fleet spectacular. In danger or not, human culture seemed to have risen to the occasion. It was noon, summer solstice at the North Pole, with a glorious armada forming a kind of sculpture garden. A new kind of harmonic convergence, Ommmmmmmm.

On one of the bigger craft, an aluminum-hulled jet-powered catamaran out of Bar Harbor, Maine, a large group of people congregated around Senator Phil Chase. Many of them were bundled in the thick red down jackets provided to guests by the National Science Foundations Department of Polar Programs, because despite the black water and brilliant sun, the air temperature at the moment was 28 degrees Fahrenheit. People kept their hoods pulled forward, and their massed body warmth comforted them as they watched the group around Chase help him into a small rainbow-colored hot-air balloon, now full over the top deck and straining at its tether.

The World’s Senator got in the basket, gave the signal; the balloon master fired the burners, and the balloon ascended into the clear air to the sound of cheers and sirens, Phil Chase waving to the fleet below, looking somewhat like the Wizard of Oz at the moment when that worthy floats away prematurely.

But Phil was on a line, and the line held. From a hundred feet above the crowd, Phil could be seen grinning his beautiful grin. “Here we are!” he announced over the fleet’s combined radio and loudspeaker array; and of course millions more saw and heard him by satellite TV. A big buoy clanged the world to order as Phil raised a hand to still the ships’ horns and fireworks.

“Folks,” he said, “I’ve been working for the people of California for seventeen years, representing them in the United States Senate, and now I want to take what I’ve learned in those efforts, and in my travels around the world, and apply all that to the work of serving the people of the United States, and all the world, as its president.”

“President of the world?” Roy Anastophoulus said to Charlie, and began to laugh.

“Shh! Shh!” Charlie said to Roy. They were watching it on TVs in different parts of the city, but talking on their phones as they watched.

“It’s a crazy thing to want to do,” Phil was conceding. “I’m the first to admit that, because I’ve seen what the job does to people. But in for a penny in for a pound, as they say, and we’ve reached a moment where somebody who can handle it needs to use the position to effect some good.”

Roy was still giggling. “Be quiet!” Charlie said.

“—there is no alternative to global cooperation. We have to admit and celebrate our interdependence, and work in solidarity with every living thing. All God’s creatures are living on this planet in one big complex organism, and we’ve got to act like that now. That’s why I’ve chosen to announce my candidacy here at the North Pole. Everything meets up here, and everything has changed because of changes that started here. This beautiful ocean, free of ice for the first time in human existence, is a sign of a clear and present danger. Recall what it looked like here even five years ago. You can’t help but admit that huge changes have already come.

“Now what do those changes mean? Nobody knows. Where will they, lead? Nobody knows. This is what everyone has to remember; no one can tell what the future will bring. Anything can happen. Anything at all. We stand at the start of a steep ski run. Black diamond for sure. I see the black diamonds twinkling everywhere down there. Down the slope of the next decade we will ski. The moguls will be on us so fast we won’t believe it. There’ll be no time for lengthy studies initiated by political administrations that never actually do anything, that hope for business as usual for one more term, after which they will take off for their fortress mansions and leave the rest of us to pick up the pieces. That won’t work, not even for them. You can get offshore, but you can’t get off planet.”

Cheers and horns and sirens echoed over the water. Phil waited for them to quiet back down, smiling happily and waving. Then he continued:

“It’s all one world now. The United States still has its historical role to fulfill, as the country of countries, the mixture and amalgam of all humanity, trying things out and seeing how they work. The United States is child of the world, you might say, and the world watches with the usual parental fascination and horror, anxiety and pride.

“So we have to grow up. If we were to turn into just another imperial bully and idiot, the story of history would be ruined, its best hope dashed. We have to give up the bad, give back the good. Franklin Delano Roosevelt described what was needed from America very aptly, in a time just as dangerous as ours: he called for a course of ‘bold and persistent experimentation.’ That’s what I plan to do also. No more empire, no more head in the sand pretending things are okay while a few rich guys wreck everything. It’s time to join the effort to invent a global civilization that we can hand off to all the children and say, ‘This will work, keep it going, make it better.’ That’s permaculture, as some people call it, and really now we have no choice; it’s either permaculture or catastrophe. Let’s choose the good fight, and work so that each generation can hand to the next one the livelihood we are given by this beautiful world.

“That’s the plan, folks. I intend to convince the Democratic Party to continue its historic work of helping to improve the lot of every man, woman, child, animal and plant on this planet. That’s the vision that has been behind all the party’s successes so far, and moving away from those core values has been part of the problem and the failure of our time. Together we’ll join humanity in making a world that is beautiful and just.”

“We’ll join humanity?” Roy said. “What’s this, Democrats as aliens?” But Charlie could barely hear him over the ship horns and cheers. On the screen he could see they were beginning to reel Phil in like a big kite.

Living outdoors the seasons were huge, simply huge. Talk about abrupt climate change—housebound people had no idea. Shorter days, cooler air, dimmer light slanting through the trees at a lower angle: you might as well be moving to another planet.

It was one of the ironies of their time that global warming was about to freeze Europe and North America, particularly on the eastern seaboard down to around Washington, D.C. Kenzo predicted a few weeks at least of severe, record-shattering lows: “You’re not going to believe it,” he kept saying, although it was already beginning in Europe, where a cool drought had prevailed all summer. “The winter high will park over Greenland and force the jet stream straight south to us from Hudson Bay. Sometimes from the Yukon, but mostly from Hudson Bay.”

“I believe it,” Frank replied. Although, in another irony, the weather at that very moment was rather glorious. The days were still hot, while the cold between two a.m. and sunrise was sharp and bracing. Here they were, only a few weeks past the depths of their Congolese summer, and already there was frost on the leaves at dawn.

For Frank these chill nights meant the deployment of his mountain gear, always a pleasure to him. He basked in that special warmth that hominids have enjoyed ever since they started wearing the furs of other animals. Clothes made the man—and therefore one of the earliest instances of the technological sublime, which was to stay warm in the cold.

Waking up in his treehouse, Frank would wrap his sleeping bag around him like a cape and sit on the plywood edge, arms over the railing, swinging his heels in space, looking at the wall of trees across the gorge. The leaves were beginning to turn, the autumn spectrum invading the green canopy with splashes of yellow and orange and red and bronze. As a Californian Frank had seldom seen it, and had never imagined it properly. He had not understood that the colors would be all mixed together, forming a field of mixed color, like a box of Trix spilled over a lawn—spelling in its gorgeous alien alphabet the end of summer, the passing of time, the omnipresence of mortality. To all who took heed it was an awesome and melancholy sight.

He let down Miss Piggy, descended into this new world. He walked absorbed in the new colors, the mushroomy smells of decay, the clattering susurrus of leaves in the wind. The next hard frost would knock most of these leaves down, and then his jungle treehouse would be exposed to the gaze of those below. Lances of sunlight already reached parts of the forest floor they hadn’t before. The park was still officially closed, but Frank saw more and more people out there, not just the homeless but also the ordinary citizens of the city, the people who had used the park before the flood as a place to run or walk or bike or ride. Luckily the creekside roads and trails were irreparable, and few would venture up the gorge past the giant beaver dam, which had started like a beaver dam and now really was one. You had to bushwhack to get around the pond’s unstable shore. Still, the treehouse’s exposure to view would exist.

But that was a problem for another day. Now Frank walked north on the deer’s trail by the creek, observing how the variegated colors of the leaves altered the sense of space in the forest, how there seemed to be an increase in sheer spaciousness, as his depth of field now took in a vast number of individual leaves in complete clarity, be they ever so small.

And so when he ran with the frisbee guys, these leaves all functioned as referent points, and he seemed to be engaging a new GPS system that locked him more than ever into the here-and-now. He saw just where he was, moment to moment, and ran without awareness of the ground, free to look about. Joy to be out on days so fresh and sunny, so dappled and yellow. Immersion in the very image and symbol of change; very soon there would come an end to his tenuously established summer routines, he would have to find new ones. He could do that; he was even in a way looking forward to it. But what about the gibbons? They were subtropical creatures, as were many of the other ferals. In the zoo they would have been kept inside heated enclosures when temperatures dropped.

Native species, and the ferals from temperate or polar regions, would probably be all right in that regard. Very often playing frisbee they spotted white-tailed deer; these would generally survive the winter without much trouble. But there were many different feral species out there. Once when they were up in the thickets of the northwest corner of the park, coming back from the ninth hole, Spencer stopped in his tracks and everyone else froze instantly; this was one of the subgames they had invented, and very useful if they wanted not to spook animals they sighted.

“What in the fuck is that,” Spencer whispered urgently to Frank.

Frank stared. It was a big ox, or a small bull, or…

It was huge. Massive, heraldic, thick-haunched, like something out of a vision; one of those sights so unbelievable that if you were dreaming it you would have woken up on the spot.

Frank got out his FOG phone, moving very slowly, and pushed the button for Nancy. How many times had he done this in the past weeks, moving the phone as slowly as he could, whispering, “Nancy—hi, it’s Frank— can you tell me what I’m looking at?”

Pause, while Nancy looked at his phone’s GPS position and checked it on her big board.

“Ah ha. You’re looking at an aurochs.”

“A what?”

“We’re pretty sure it’s an aurochs. North Europe, Ice Age—”

Suddenly it looked familiar to Frank.

“—some Polish researchers took frozen DNA from one and cloned it a few years ago. Birthed from a sheep or something. They had an enclosure in their southern forest with a herd running around it. We don’t know how these we’re seeing got here, actually. They’re mostly up in Maryland. Some kind of private act of dispersion, I think, like that guy who decided to transplant all the bird species mentioned in Shakespeare to North America, and gave us the starling infestation among other problems…”

Frank took the phone from his ear, as Spencer’s face was contorting grotesquely to convey to him the question what what what.

“Aurochs,” Frank whispered loudly.

Spencer’s face shifted again, into the mask for The Great ah-ha of Comprehension, then Delight, his blue eyes bla2ing like Paul Newman’s. He looked at the beast, foursquare on the ridge, and in slow motion crumpled to his knees, hands clasping his frisbee before him in prayer. Robin and Robert held their frisbees before them as well, grinning as they always did. Robin stretched his hands palm out over his head to indicate homage, or express the bigness of the animal.

Its proportions were strange, Frank saw, the rear legs and haunches big and rounded. A creature from the cave paintings, sprung live into their world.

Spencer stood back up. He held his frisbee out to the other guys, waggled his eyebrows, mimed a throw at the aurochs: make it a target? Eyes ablaze, on the edge of a shout: never before had Frank seen the shaman in Spencer so clearly. Of course they had already discussed throwing at animals many times before. It would be the greatest thing in the world to make targets of the ubiquitous white-tailed deer, for instance. The stalk, the throw, the strike— exhilarating. Like catch and release fishing, only better. No one disputed this. The animals would not be hurt. It would be hunting without killing.

But really, as Spencer himself had argued when they discussed it, they were hunting without killing already. And sometimes, if they threw at them, animals would get hurt. If they wanted the animals to prosper in the park, which after all was not so big—if they wanted animals to inhabit the world with them, which also was not so big—then they oughtn’t harass them by whacking them out of the blue with hard plastic disks. Best dharma practice was compassion for all sentient beings, thus using them for targets contra-indicated. So they had refused the temptation.

Now, Spencer’s point seemed to be that this was a magical occasion, outside all everyday agreements. There stood an icon from the Ice Age—a living fossil, in effect, sprung to life from out of the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira—so that they really had to abandon their ordinary protocols to do justice to the beast, to enter the sacred space of the paleolithic mind. Make this magnificent creature their target as a sort of religious ritual, even a religious obligation one might say.

All this Spencer conveyed by mime, alternating the hands-in-prayer position with the throwing motion, making faces as contorted and clear as any demon mask. Holy activity; tribute to Homo erectus; form of nature worship.

“All at once,” Frank whispered. The others nodded.

Frank aimed and threw with the rest of them, and four disks flashed through the forest. One hit a tree and startled the aurochs a step forward, then another struck him on the flank, causing him to bolt up the ridge and away, out of sight before they were even done screaming. They high-fived each other and ran to collect their frisbees and play on.

So each blustery afternoon changed his life. That was autumn, that was how it should feel, Frank saw, the landscape suffused with the ache of everything fleeting by. A new world every heartbeat. He had to incorporate this feeling of perpetual change, make it an aspect of optimodality. Of course everything always changed! How beautiful that the landscape sang that truth so clearly! Ooooooooop!

More than ever he loved being in his treehouse. He would have to find a way to continue doing it as the winter came on, even in the midst of storms, yes of course. John Muir had climbed trees during storms to get a better view of them, and Frank knew from his mountaineering days that storms were a beautiful time to be out, if one were properly geared. He could pitch his tent on the plywood floor; and his heaviest sleeping bag would keep him warm in anything. Would he bounce around like a sailor at the top of a mast? He wanted to find out. John Muir had found out.

He would not move indoors. He did not want to, and he would not have to. The paleolithics had lived through ice ages, faced cold and storms for thousands of years. A new theory postulated that populations islanded by abrupt climate change had been forced to invent cooperative behaviors in bad weather time and time again, ultimately changing the gene and bringing about the last stages of human evolution. Good snowshoes, clothing as warm as Frank’s mountain gear, fire carriers, bow and arrow. The appearance in the archeological record of bone sewing needles and trap nets correlated with a huge extension northward, some forty thousand years ago. They had not only coped, but expanded their range.

Maybe they were going to have to do that again.

Clothing and shelter. At work Frank could see that civilized people did not really think about these things, they took them for granted. Most wore clothing suited to “room temperature” all the year round, thus sweltering in the summer and shivering in winter anytime they stepped out of their rooms—which however they rarely did. So they thought they were temperature tough-guys, but really they were just indoors all the time. They used their buildings as clothing, in effect, and heated or cooled these spaces to imitate what clothing did, no matter how crazy this was in energy terms. But they did it without thinking of it like that, without making that calculation. In the summer they wore blue jeans because of what people three generations before had seen in Marlboro ads. Blue jeans were the SUVs of pants, part of a fantasy outdoor life; Frank himself had long since changed to the Khembali ultralite cotton pants in summer, noting with admiration how the slight crinkle in the material kept most of the cloth off the skin.

Now as it got colder people still wore blue jeans, which were just as useless in the cold as they were in the heat. Frank meanwhile shifted piece by piece into his mountaineering gear. Some items needed cleaning, but were too delicate to run through a washing machine, so he had to find a dry cleaners on Connecticut, but then was pleasantly surprised to discover that they would take all his other clothes too; he had disliked going to the laundromat up the street from Van Ness.

So, autumn weather, cool and windy: therefore, Patagonia’s capilene shirts, their wicking material fuzzy and light against the skin; a down vest with a down hood ready to pull onto his head; nylon wind-jacket; Patagonia’s capilene long underwear; wool pants; nylon wind-pants if windy. Thick Thurlo socks inside light Salomon hiking shoes. As an ensemble it looked pretty good, in an Outside Magazine techno-geek way—a style which actually fit in pretty unobtrusively at NSF. Scientists signaled with their clothes just like anyone else, and their signal often proclaimed, “I am a scientist, I do things because they Make Sense, and so I Dress Sensibly,” which could resemble Frank’s mountaineering gear, as it meant recreational jackets with hoods, hiking boots, ski pants, wool shirts. So Frank could dress as a high-tech paleolithic and still look like any other NSF jock.

Work itself was becoming bogged down in the bureaucratic swamps that had replaced the physical ones. The actual bogs had been drained but somehow remained as ghosts, dragging down each generation of trespassers in turn; the federal capital thus retained the psychic nature of the original swamp, and its function too, as all the toxins of the national life were dumped there to be stirred together and broken down in its burbling pits.

Trying to hack her way through this wilderness was beginning to get Diane both results and resistance. She spent about fourteen hours a day, Frank reckoned, in meetings up on the eleventh floor at NSF and elsewhere in the area. Many of these meetings he did not attend and only heard about, usually from Edgardo, who as director of the math division and a long-time colleague of Diane’s took part in quite a few. Some agencies were interested in joining the cause, Edgardo reported, and others resented the suggestion that things be done differently, considering it an attack on turf. In general the farther removed from making policy, the more interested they were to help. A fair number of agencies with regulatory power were fully turned by the industries they were supposed to regulate, and thus usually agents of the enemies of change; among these were the Department of Energy (nuclear and oil industry), the FDA (food and drug), the U.S. Forest Service and other parts of the Department of Agriculture (timber and ag), and the EPA (a curious mix, depending on division, but some of them bound to the pesticide industry and all under the thumb of the president). Republican administrations had regularly staffed these agencies with people chosen from the industries being regulated, and these people had then written regulations with the industries’ profits in mind. Now these agencies were not just toothless but actively dangerous, no matter how good their people were at the technocrat level. They were turned at the top, their potential good suborned.

Thus it was that Diane had to work around and against several of these agencies, particularly Energy. Not that nuclear wasn’t arguably a valid part of some mid-range clean energy solution, as Edgardo often argued; but the Energy leadership took this to mean also trying to cripple other, less dangerous alternatives. It was becoming clear that part of NSF’s project had to include making efforts to get leadership of the captive agencies changed, for the good of the environment and the long-term health of the country; but that implied involvement in presidential politics. For the turned agencies were now out to do the same to NSF, working on the administration to remove the director and upper management and replace them with people more sympathetic to the economy.

So, on top of everything else: war of the agencies.

The first manifestation of this new realm of conflict was the appointment of a new NSF Inspector General, who turned out to be a man who had most recently been Inspector General in the Department of Energy; before that he had worked for Southern California Edison, and had been a major contributor to the president’s campaign.

No accident, of course, Edgardo said. It was a first shot, aimed by OMB itself. That was bad, very bad. Edgardo went on a long paranoid aria during one of their runs, detailing just how bad it could be, and all the ways Diane was going to have to be on guard in the months to come; and her past had better be spotless. “I said to her I hope you have a very honest tax man, and she just laughed. Two can play at that game,’ she said, ‘and I’m cleaner than they are.’ So off we go, off to the mattresses.”

Frank sang, “Territoriality, ooooop! Does that mean we’re screwed then?” “No, not necessarily. There are too many funding sources with a really serious interest in mitigating climate damage. The science agencies, emergency services, even NIH, even the Pentagon. It’s up to Diane to build an alliance that can get things done. They’ll have to fight for everything they get. It would help a lot if they could turn the other side right at the head, and convince the president’s team that this stuff has to be done, and that it could be taken as an opportunity for new technologies and businesses that the rest of the world is going to have to use. Whether that could work, I don’t know the White House well enough to say. They seem like idiots, but they can’t be as stupid as they seem or they wouldn’t be there. Anyway Diane says she’s going to give it a try. Senate first, but White House too.”

In Frank’s meetings with her, Diane did not refer to this part of the struggle, preferring to discuss the technical aspects of their work. The North Atlantic project was still being researched, and Diane still liked it very much, but she was very concerned that they also pursue a vigorous hunt for some biologically based carbon capture method. Frank wondered if the legal and political problems inherent in releasing a genetically modified organism into the environment could ever be overcome; but he knew exactly who to call about the technical aspects of it, of course.

He had been thinking of calling Marta and Yann again anyway. So, after a meeting with Diane, he steeled himself to the task. Thinking of the surveillance issue, he wondered if he should call them from a public phone, but realized both ends had to be unsurveiled for that to work. No, best to do this work in the open and let the chips fall where they may, the stocks rise as they might. So he called them at their Small Delivery numbers, from his office.

“Hi Marta, it’s Frank. I wanted to talk to you and Yann about the carbon capture work you described to me. Can you tell me how that study is coming along, I mean just in general terms?”

“It’s going okay.”

“So, you know—in the absence of long-term field studies, have you gotten any back-of-the-envelopes on how quickly it might work, or how much it might draw down?”

“We can only extrapolate from lab results.”

“And what does that indicate, if anything?”

“It could be considerable.”

“I see.”

Marta said, “How’s the San Diego project coming along?”

“Oh good, good. I mean, I’m recused from any direct action on that front, but I’m following the process, and people at UCSD and in the biotech community there are really excited about it. So I think something will happen.”

“And we’ll have a place in it?”

“Yes, well, they’re working on an offer. There’s going to be a kind of MacArthur award committee disbursing some research money; it won’t be quite as unconstrained as MacArthur money, but there will be a lot of it, and it will be awarded without applications to people judged deserving.”

“I see.” Marta’s voice was still heavy with skepticism, but Frank noted that she was not being actively hostile either. “Well, I look forward to seeing how that goes.”

“It would surely help you if you’re ever going to try to deploy anything like this lichen you’ve described.”

“We’ve got an array of options,” she said shortly, and would not elaborate.

Next morning at NSF he found out from Edgardo that Diane had been in a fight with the president’s Science Advisor, Dr. Zacharius Strengloft. Strengloft had suggested to her in a meeting at the Capitol with the Senate Natural Resources Committee that NSF should keep to what it was good at, which meant disbursing grant money. Diane had given him her Look of Stone and then told him in no uncertain terms that NSF was run by her and the National Science Board and no one else. Senate and staff who had witnessed the confrontation would of course take differing meanings from it.

Soon after that Diane convened a full meeting of the National Science Board, which was NSF’s board of directors, in effect. The twenty-four members of the board had all been appointed by the president, from a list which, though vetted by Strengloft, had been created by the National Academy of Sciences and other sources. This meant they were a mixed-ideology group, and clearly Diane wanted to make sure they were behind her for the coming battles. She made it a closed meeting, and when she came out of it Frank couldn’t tell if she had gotten what she wanted or not. But later she told him they had been almost unanimous in their support for NSF trying to coordinate a national response, even an international response. Then he saw again the little smile that crossed her face sometimes when she had gotten her way in these struggles. She seemed unflustered, even content. She shook her head wonderingly as she told Frank about it, put a hand to his arm, as in the gym, smiled her little smile. What a strange game they were caught in, she seemed to say. But clearly no one was going to intimidate her. Frank certainly wouldn’t want to be the one to try it.

Meanwhile, to implement anything in the North Atlantic, they would have to coordinate plans with the IPCC., and the rest of the UN, and really the whole world; get approvals, get funding, get the actual materials manufactured or gathered, whatever they might be.

Eventually this need to liaise with international agencies impelled them to arrange a day’s meetings in the UN building in New York. Diane asked Frank to join her for a few of these, and he was happy to agree.

“Easy travel to other planets,” he said.

“What?”

“Manhattan.”

“Oh, yes.”

When hanging with the bros in the evenings, Frank sometimes became curious about their plans. The picnic tables and fireplace were not going to hack it as winter furniture. The fireplace was such a misbegotten thing, like a pizza oven placed on the ground, that it was useless for heating, cooking, or fire-gazing. Perhaps that was the point; surely the men of the CCC, or whoever had built the thing, had to have known better. Some of the other picnic sites had open fire rings; but the bros had chosen to hang here by the oven.

One night Frank arrived to find they had tried to solve this problem by commandeering a steel trash barrel and starting a fire inside it, a fire that only just flickered over its rim. Possibly the entire barrel gave off some radiant heat, and the fire would not be visible from a distance, of course, if that was a concern. But it was a miserable excuse for a campfire.

“Hey Perfesser!” Zeno bellowed. “How’s it hanging, man? We haven’t seen you for a while.”

The others chimed in with their habitual welcomes. “He’s been too busy?’ “Those co-eds wanted him.”

They were all bulked up, thick with thrift shop sweaters and coats, and also, Frank was pleased to see, greasy down jackets. Old down jackets were probably cheap, being unfashionable; and there was nothing better in the cold.

“Hey,” he said. “Super long time. What was it, yesterday?”

“Yarrr. Ha ha ha.”

“I know you’ve done so much you want to tell me about.”

“HA!!!” They crowed their approval of this jape. “We ain’t done a fucking thing! Why should we?”

And yet it soon transpired that they had all experienced an extraordinary number of traumas since Frank last came around. They interrupted each other ceaselessly as they related them, making a mish-mash that no one could have followed, but Frank knew from the start not to try. “Yeah right,” was all he had to say from time to time. Again it struck him how well they recalled scrapes, scuffles, or fights; they could re-enact every move in slow motion, and did so when telling their tale—it was part of the tale, maybe the most interesting part: “I twisted like this, and he missed over my shoulder, like this, and then I ducked,” ducking and weaving against the absent but well-remembered opponent.

“We had to pull him right off the guy, yeah! I had to peel his fingers right off of his neck! He was pounding his head right against the concrete.’’

Finally they were done. Frank said, “Hey, your fire? It sucks.”

A shout of agreement and dissent. Zeno said, “Hey whaddya mean, dude? It’s perfect for shoving yer head in the can!”

“YARRR.”

“That’s the only way you could see it,” Frank countered. “Why don’t you go where one of the good firepits are?”

They laughed at his naïveté. “That’d be too good for us!”

“Might have us a fire if we did that!”

One of them mimed a karate kick at the stone oven. “Piece of shit.”

“You need fire,” Frank said.

“We GOT a fire.”

“Can’t you knock the top of this thing off, or make a fire ring next to it or something? Aren’t there any demolition sites or construction sites around here where you could get some cinder blocks?”

“Don’t be bringing the man down on us any more than he already is,” Fedpage said.

“Whatever,” Frank said. “You’re gonna freeze your asses off.”

“It’s a half-assed fire.”

“You have to put your hands right on the metal, it’s ridiculous.”

“No fucking way, it’s warm from here!”

“Yeah right.”

They settled in. The topic shifted to winter and winterizing in general, so Frank sat back and listened. No way were they going to respond to his words by jumping out into the night and putting together a decent fire ring. If that had been their style they wouldn’t be out here in the first place. Maybe later it would sink in.

A few of them discussed the prospects of sleeping at the Metro stops just coming back on line; the regulars for these spots had dispersed, so that good grates were going unclaimed. You could nest on a good site all day. But that risked a poorly-timed rousting by the cops. But if you didn’t take the risk, you weren’t likely to find a good spot.

Zeno declared he was going to build a hut and sleep right there by their site. Others agreed immediately that good shelters could be made. It all sounded hypothetical to Frank, he thought they were just covering for the fact that they didn’t want to talk about where they really slept.

That made sense to Frank; he wasn’t telling people where he slept either. The bros were under a different kind of surveillance than he was, more erratic but potentially much more immediate, with consequences much worse than Frank’s (one hoped). They had police records, many of them extensive. Technically much of what they were doing was illegal, including being in Rock Creek Park at all. Luckily a lot of people were doing the same thing. It was the herd defense; predators would pick off the weak, but the bulk of the herd would be okay. The more the better, therefore, up to a point—a point they had not yet reached, even though many little squatter settlements and even what could be called shanty towns were now visible in flood-damaged parts of town, especially in the parks. Ultimately this might trigger some large-scale crackdown, and Rock Creek Park was high profile. But the gorge’s new ravine walls were steep and unstable, impossible to patrol at night. To clear the gorge they would have to do it by day and call out the National Guard—both of them, as Zeno always added. If they did that the bros could slip away into the city, or north into the forest across the Maryland border.

Meanwhile, out of sight, out of mind. They were off the grid, they had slung their hooks, they had lit out for the territory. The firelight bounced on their worn faces, etching each knock and crease. Little more of them could be seen, making it seem like a circle of disembodied faces—masks again—or a Rockwell Kent woodblock.

“There was this guy living on the streets in San Francisco who turned out was like totally rich, he was heir to a fortune but he just liked living outdoors.”

“But he was a drunk too, right?”

“Fucking George Carlin is so funny.”

“They said I was grade ten but they wouldn’t give me dental.”

Blah blah blah. Frank recalled a fire from his youth: two climber gals slightly buzzed had come bombing into Camp Four around midnight and hauled him away from a dying fire, insisting that he join them in a midnight swim in the Merced River, and who could say no to that. Though it was shocking cold water and pitch black to boot, more a good idea than a comfortable reality, swimming with two naked California women in the Yosemite night. But then when they got out and staggered back to the fire, near dead from hypothermia, it had been necessary to pile on wood until it was a leaping yellow blaze and dance before it to catch every pulse of lifesaving heat. Even at the time Frank had understood that he would never see anything more beautiful.

Now he sat with a bunch of red-faced homeless guys bundled in their greasy down jackets, around a fire hidden at the bottom of a trashcan. The contrast with the night at Camp Four was so complete that it made him laugh. It made the two nights part of the same thing somehow.

“We should build a real fire,” he said.

No one moved. Ashes rose on the smoke from the trashcan. Frank reached in with a two-by-four and tried to stir it up enough to give them some flame over the rim. “If you have a fire but you can’t see it,” he said as he jabbed, “then you go out of your mind.”

Fedpage snorted. “Central heating, right?”

“So everyone’s crazy, yarr. Of course they are.”

“We certainly are.”

“Is that what did it hey?”

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

“When did someone first say that, a million years ago? Oooop! Ooop! Oooop!”

“Hey there monkey man, quit that now! You sound like Meg Ryan in that movie.”

“Ha ha haaaa! That was so fucking funny.”

“She was faking it! She was faking it”

“I’ll take it fake or not.”

“As if you could tell!”

“—greatest human vocalization ever recorded.”

“Yeah right, you obviously don’t know your porn.”

Things that would warm a body: laughter; re-enacting fights; playing air guitar; playing with fire; talking about sex; thinking about climber gals.

Knocking a stone oven apart would definitely warm the body. Frank got up. What he needed was a sledgehammer and a crowbar; what they had were some lengths of two-by-four and an old aluminum baseball bat, already much dented.

One stone in the little opening at the top was loose in its cement. Frank moved to what looked like the right angle and smashed the stone with a two-by-four. The bros were pleased at the diversion, they guffawed and urged him on. He knocked the first stone down into the firepit, reached into the ashes and rolled it out. After that it was a matter of knocking loose one stone at a time. He used the longest two-by-four and pounded away. The cement was old, and stone by stone the firepit came down.

When he had gotten it down to knee height it made a sensible firepit, with a gap in one side where the old doorway had been. He filled the gap with stones. There were enough left over to make another firepit if they wanted one. Or maybe bench supports, if they found some planks.

“Okay, let’s move the trashcan fire into the pit,” he said.

“How you gonna pick it up? That can is red hot down there at the bottom, don’t you pick that up!”

“You’ll burn your fucking hands off man!”

“It’s not red hot,” Frank pointed out. “Let’s a couple of us grab it around the top. Wear gloves and tilt it, and we’ll lift the bottom with the studs here.”

“Roll and burn your fucking leg off!”

“Yeah right!”

But Zeno was willing to do it, and so the rest gathered round. The ones who had gloves grasped the rim, lifted and tilted. Frank and Andy wedged studs under the bottom from opposite sides and lifted it up. With a whoosh the whole fiery mass sparked into the new ring and blasted up into the night. Howls chased the uprush of smoke and sparks.

They sat around the cheery blaze, suddenly much more visible to each other.

“Now we need a pizza!”

“Who’ll get a pizza?”

They all looked at Frank. “Ah shit,” he said. “Where’s Cutter?”

“Get some beer too!” Zeno said, with the same fake laugh as before.

Kicking through piles of fallen leaves, the cold air struck him like a splash of water in the face. It felt good. He had to laugh: all his life he had traveled to the mountains and the polar regions to breathe air this bracing and heady, and here it was, right now in the middle of this ridiculous city. Maybe the seasons would become his terrain now, and winter would be like high altitude or high latitude. It could be good.

The afternoon before he and Diane were going to leave for New York, he phoned Spencer to see when they were playing, because he wanted to get one more game in before he left town.

It was a perfect October day, Indian summer, and in the amber horizontal light of sunset they threw across a stiff western breeze that brought a continuous rain of yellow and brown leaves spinnerdrifting down on them. Frank slung his disk through the forest’s tickertape parade, hooting with all the rest, and he was deep in the game when they ran into the bros’ little clearing.

Spencer stopped so abruptly that Frank almost rammed into him, thinking aurochs, but then he saw half a dozen men wearing flak jackets, aiming big assault rifles at the astonished bros.

“Get down on the ground!” one of the men shouted. “Get down right now! GET DOWN.”

The guys dropped awkwardly, faces on the ground, arms out to the side.

The frisbee players stayed frozen in place. One of the men turned and said to them, “We’ll be just a minute more here. Why don’t you be on your way.”

Frank and the frisbee guys nodded and took off down Ross, jogging until they were around the corner, then stopping and looking back.

“What the fuck was that?”

“A bust.”

“Yeah but who?”

“We’ll find out on the way back.”

They played on, distracted, missing shot after shot. On the way back they hurried the pace, and came into site 21 huffing.

The guys were still there, sitting around—all but Jory.

“Hey guys what was that all about?” Spencer cried as they ran in. “That looked horrible!”

“They rousted us,” Zeno said.

Redbeard shook his head resentfully. “They made us lie down on the ground like we were criminals.”

“They didn’t want any trouble,” said Zeno. “They thought Jory might be carrying.”

Ah ha. Jory, the only one who had ever made Frank feel seriously uncomfortable. So it had not been a misreading.

“They were ready to shoot us,” Redbeard complained.

“Sure they were. They probably heard Jory had a gun.”

“So it was Jory they were after?” Spencer said. “What did he do?”

“Jory’s the one who beat up on Ralph! Don’t you know?”

“No.”

“Yes you do, it was in the papers. Ralph got pounded by Jory and a guy, down at 18.”

“We had to pull him right off the guy, yeah! I had to peel his fingers right off of his neck! He was pounding his head right against the concrete”

“Yeah, so Ralph was in the hospital after that, but then a couple weeks later Jory showed up again and started hanging out with us like nothing had happened.”

“Jesus,” Frank said. “Why didn’t you go to the police and get rid of this guy?”

They shouted “YEAH RIGHT” at him in unison. Then, interrupting each other in their eagerness:

“What do you think they’re going to do?”

“They’ll call in and find out about my outstandings and get my parole officer—”

“Fuck that, they’ll beat on you—”

“You could end up put away for fucking year.”

Zeno’s grin was sharklike. “Some things you just gotta live with, Doctor. The police are not there for us. Assholes come to hang with us, that’s just the way it is.”

“Hard to believe,” Frank said.

“Is it?”

On they ran, and after they had finished their frisbee, Frank asked Spencer about it. “So they can’t get help from the police if they need it?”

Spencer shook his head. “We can’t either, for that matter. People without a legal place of residence are kind of outside the legal system. It’s very property-based.”

“Don’t you guys have places to live?”

Spencer, Robin, and Robert laughed.

“We do have places to live,” Spencer said, “but we don’t pay for them.”

“What do you do then?”

“We wander a bit. Just like you, right? We hunt and gather in the technosurround.”

“A godly state,” Robin said.

“Come to dinner and see,” Spencer offered. “The fregans in Klingle Valley are having a potluck.”

“I don’t have anything to bring.”

“Don’t worry. There’ll be enough. Maybe you can buy a bottle of wine on the way over.”

On the walk through the park to Klingle Valley, one of the park tributaries of Rock Creek, Spencer and the others explained to Frank that they were ferals.

“You use that word?”

Yes, that’s what they usually called their mode these days, but also squatters, scavengers, fregans. There were ferals living in every city. It was a kind of urban wilderness thing.

“Fregan, what’s that?”

“It’s like vegan, only they’ll only eat food that they’ve gotten for free.”

“Say what?”

“They eat out of dumpsters and such. Scavenge food that is going to waste.”

“Whoah.”

“Think about how many restaurants there are in D.C.,” said Spencer. So many fine restaurants, so much wonderful food, and a certain percentage of it thrown away every night. Perfectly good fresh food. That was just the way the restaurant business had to run. So, if you knew the routine at these dumpsters, and you resolved never to spend money on food, but always either to grow it or scavenge it—or kill it, in the case of the many white-tailed deer being culled and eaten—then you were a fregan. They were going to a fregan potluck that very night. There would be lots of venison.

The house hosting the potluck was boarded up, having been badly damaged in a fire. They slipped in the back to find a party going on, a whole bunch of people, young and not so young, some tattooed and pierced, others tie-dyed and rastafied. There was a fire in the fireplace, but the flue wasn’t drawing well; added to this smokiness was a funky mix of wet dog, patchouli, potluck food, and whatever was burning in a hookah in the corner: a mix of hash, cigars, and clove cigarettes, judging by the cloud Frank walked through.

The frisbee players were greeted warmly, and Spencer was acclaimed as some kind of local celebrity, a gypsy king. He introduced Frank very informally, and hustled him through to the food table—“always wisest to get it while you can”— and they feasted on a selection of Washington restauranteering’s finest, slightly reconstituted for the occasion: steaks, quiche, salad, bread. Spencer ate like a wolf, and by the time they were done Frank was stuffed as well.

“See?” Spencer said as they sat on the floor watching the crowd flow by. “There are lots of empty buildings in this city. If you work as a team and spend your time taking care of business, then you can find shelter and food for free. Scavenge clothes or buy in thrift shops, talk with people or play frisbee for fun, walk wherever you go—you can step outside the money economy almost entirely. Live off the excess, so you don’t add to the waste. You reduce waste, you pour energy back into the grid. Do a little street theater down in the lawyer district to gather some change, even do day labor or take a job in one of the shops. You don’t actually need money at all, although a little bit helps.”

“Wow,” Frank said. “And about how many people are doing this?”

“It’s hard to tell. It’s best to stay under the radar, because of just the sort of police issues you were asking the bros about. I think there’s several hundred people at least, maybe a thousand, who think of themselves as fregans or ferals. Obviously there are a lot more homeless people than that, but I’m talking about the people going at it like we are.”

“Wow.”

“How you think about what you’re doing makes a huge difference.”

“That’s true.”

A group in the corner was preparing to play some music: two guitars, mandolin, fiddle, wooden flute, a Bombay harmonium. Two young women came over to haul Spencer to his feet; a command performance, he was needed on percussion.

Frank said, “Thanks Spencer, I’m going to have to go soon.”

“That’s all right man, there’ll be more of these. Frisbee tomorrow?”

“No, I’ve got to go to New York. I’ll check in when I get back.”

“See you then.”

Frank and Diane took the train to New York. They sat facing each other over a table on the morning express from Union Station to Penn Station, rocking slightly as they worked on their laptops, stopping from time to time to sip their coffees and look out the window and talk. Sometimes this lasted half an hour, then they returned to work. It was companionable.

Out the window flashed the backs of long row houses, tawdry unkempt yards. Old industrial buildings of the Mid-Atlantic states, rusty and broken-windowed, flying by click-click-click, sway sway, gone. Over one of the great rivers, then by the gray Atlantic, mumbling its dirty whitecaps onshore.

Then descending underground, to go under the Hudson and enter Metropolis, just like Fritz Lang pictured it. Dark ancient brick walls, unmarked by any graffiti.

The train stopped in midtunnel.

“Did you ever live in New York?” Diane asked.

“No. I’ve hardly even visited.”

“Wow.”

“You lived here?”

“Yes, I went to Columbia.”

“What for?”

“Med school.”

“Really.”

“Yes, a long time ago.”

“Did you practice medicine?”

“Sure. Five years, but then I got into research, and then administration, and that just kept going, I guess you’d say.”

“Yes, I would,” peering at her laptop screensaver, which cycled a succession of Asian-American faces. “I mean, director of NSF—that’s administration all right.”

She sighed. “It’s true. Things just kept on happening.”

She tapped a button and made the faces go away. Replacing them was her calendar, every hour and half hour obviously accounted for. Under it was a spreadsheet of projects, a kind of Things To Do list, but with events categorized and broken down by background reading, premeetings, biographies of participants, and so on.

“You must have a system too,” she noted, seeing him looking at it.

“Sure,” Frank said. “A Things To Do list.”

“That sounds healthier than this. So, are you enjoying yourself?”

“Well, I suppose I am.”

She laughed. “More than last year anyway, I hope?”

He felt himself blushing. “Yeah, sure. It’s more of a challenge, of course. But I asked for it.” He gulped at that topic, and said quickly, “I’ll be a lot happier if the UN goes for one of these projects.”

“Sure. But the work itself, in the building?”

“Yeah, sure. More variety.”

“It still isn’t research.”

“I know. But I’m trying. Maybe it’s a different kind. I don’t know. I’ve never been too sure what we’re up to at NSF.”

“I know.”

His face was fully hot now. He thought: Come on, don’t be chicken here; if ever there was a chance to talk about this, it’s here and now. Only a few short months before, Diane had taken Frank’s angry critique of NSF and

And he had agreed to do it.

So he took a deep breath, and said, “Why didn’t you say anything when I gave you that letter?”

She pursed her lips. “I thought I did.”

“Yes,” he tried not to be irritated, “but you know what I mean.”

She nodded, looked down and tapped a note into her schedule. “It read to me like someone who was burnt out on doing jackets, and wanted to be doing something else. NSF itself didn’t really seem to be what you were talking about, not to me.”

“Well, maybe not entirely, but I did want to talk about it too.”

“Sure. I thought you made some good points. I thought you might be interested in trying them out. So, here you are.”

“So you let the other stuff go.”

“It has to stay in your file, I can’t change people’s files. But there’s no sense looking for trouble. I find letting trouble stay in a file often works pretty well. And in your case, it was all going to work out one way or another. Either you’d go back to San Diego, or you’d help us here. In that sense you did good to give it to me in person like you did, I mean just the hard copy.”

“I tried to take it back,” Frank confessed.

“You did? How?”

“I came back and looked for it. But Laveta had already given it to you.”

“I see. I’m glad she did. I think it’s worked out for the best.”

Frank thought about it.

“Don’t you?”

“Well, yes. I don’t know. I guess I’m still finding out.”

She smiled her little smile again, and he discovered he liked to see it. He liked to cause it.

The train moved again, and soon pulled into Penn Station. Up on the streets of Manhattan they walked through the immense slots created by the skyscrapers, across midtown to the UN building, Frank goggling at the views with an ex-window-washer’s awe.

The day’s work at the UN was interesting. Frank got to see another side of Diane, perhaps a glimpse of her true métier, as some kind of international diplomat or technocrat. She knew all these people already, and in the meetings she got up from her seat from time to time to look over their shoulders at their screens, putting a hand to a shoulder while pointing and asking a question. They all had met many times before, clearly; there was even a pause wherein the Secretary General himself dropped by to say hi to her, thanking her lavishly for “all she was doing.” Back in the discussions, she was always driving the issue, always pushing for action, occasionally joking about the fact that she was a representative of the United States and yet still promoting a vigorous array of environmental actions. She didn’t overplay this, but her message seemed to be that although the U.S. historically had been part of the problem in global warming, from rejecting Kyoto to pumping more carbon than any other country into the atmosphere, that was all about to change. As for the past, Diane and her allies had nothing to be ashamed of just because they had not prevailed politically. In one conversation she made the point that polls showed that a majority of American citizens were interested in protecting the environment, and wanted their government to do something about climate change, so that it was not a matter of being outnumbered so much as denied, as part of a more general breakdown of democratic systems in the U.S. Diane shrugged as she said this; no cause for outrage—the fight against greed was never going to end—meanwhile, she served as an ambassador for all the elements of American society who wanted to engage the climate problem. Now they might be in a position to prevail.

Mostly all this was implicit in her manner: cheerful, unapologetic, intent on the present, and on future results. She pushed relentlessly all day, discussing plan after plan, typing memos into her laptop and then without further ado moving on to the next matter, sometimes with a changed cast facing her, other times abruptly with the same people, with nothing more than an: “Okay, what about this?”

Late in the day they met with representatives of the European carbon emissions trading group and futures market; there was a futures market in carbon credits, as there was for everything else, and Diane felt its calculations could be tweaked to make it more accurate and useful. The carbon treaty talks scheduled for the following year were almost certain to make emissions much more expensive, and this was the kind of prospect that often gave a huge push to a futures market, as people tried to buy while the commodity was still cheap. (Frank followed this discussion very closely, thinking about his own commodity status.) That kind of investment could generate a big fund in advance of the need for it in payouts, and that could be used to prime the pump for various mitigation projects. Calculations using the Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy, DICE-99, showed that a carbon tax as low as ten cents a gallon of gas at the pump could have built up a hedge fund large enough to fund almost any mitigation they could conceive, if they had pegged the tax to inflation and started it some years before; they had missed that precautionary opportunity as they had so many others, but in many ways it still existed, and most nations were instituting some version of a carbon exchange and a carbon tax.

After that they met with delegations from China, then India, then the European Union and the African Union. Usually representatives from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were on hand, and the discussions had a curiously suspended or hypothetical air; if Diane were the American president or a representative of his, they would have been more intent perhaps to press their positions; as it was they knew they were dealing with a kind of shadow government figure, or with the amorphous scientific community out there beyond the government, which Diane might be said to represent. She understood this and dealt with it using a kind of tightrope-walking tact, diplomatic and attractive; there were things NSF could do, and things it might do, were the political climate to change; and the physical climate changes might drive the political ones.

After these meetings, it was the IPCC crowd itself who stayed on in the meeting rooms. The IPCC was one of the oldest and most influential global warming study groups; their list of suggested amelioration projects was huge, and they had already performed or commissioned preliminary studies of most of them, so that they had them sorted by cost, size, type, area, time needed, potential carbon drawdown, estimated time of sequestration, secondary effects, and many other determinants. They went over this list item by item in the late afternoon and early evening, and by the time they were done it certainly seemed like a robust carbon capture campaign could be constructed, if the funding were there and political obstructions did not exist.

Diane and Frank’s questions to them about an intervention in the North Atlantic broached new territory, however, and though they were interested, the discussion could only outline the parameters of the problem. The International Maritime Treaty was administered through the UN, so there were experts available to answer some of Diane’s questions, but it would take them some time.

Then they were done, and it was dark outside, the windows reflecting them in the room. Workday over, in Manhattan in the cocktail hour, on a clear chill November evening.

“Dinner,” Diane announced, looking down at the East River and its bridges.

“Right,” said Frank. He was hungry.

“Shall we try this place I know?”

They were on a date.

They were on a date in the big city, the world’s great city, paradigmatic and incomparable. Manhattan always boggled Frank; he had spent very little time in it, and that spread out over the years. Here the primate mind had to be stunned by the verticality of the cliffs and canyons and towers. Add to those unnatural landforms the rivers of cars and taxis, and the omnipresence of people, hundreds in view at every moment, and the cumulative effect was staggering—literally so for Frank, as he had no inhibitions about spinning down the sidewalks, head swiveling like an owl’s to see more. Diane had to grab his arm and pull him out of traffic when he tried to get a better view of the Chrysler building. Yes, there they were, arm in arm on the streets of Manhattan, laughing at Frank’s hick amazement, his window-washer’s euphoria. West through midtown, then up toward Central Park, where Diane knew of a good restaurant. In the crowd at the next red light she slipped her arm out of his, which released him from an awkward position, in which his forearm had hung as if from an invisible sling to give her forearm something to rest on. These old postures. And yet the touch had coursed through him as he walked, like a light charge of electricity, or a new idea. Oooooooop.

The restaurant proved to be run by Chinese or east Asians of some other kind, Frank didn’t inquire because in every other respect the restaurant was pure Provencal. It was jammed into an archetypal Manhattan restaurant space, two stories of narrow rooms with a patio in the airshaft out back, a deep brick-walled enclosure, home to a hardy old tree; the whole burnished to a mysterious black-brick and battered-wood perfection.

Two faces in candlelight over a restaurant table: an old situation, and they both knew it. Although probably only Frank was also helplessly theorizing the event in terms of its million-year-old tradition. Two faces in the light of a fire, one male one female: eat, drink, man, woman. Big parts of the brain were no doubt ignited by the candlelight alone, not to mention the smells and tastes. A million years.

They talked about the day, the work in hand. Frank admitted to being impressed by the IPCC group and the work they had done. “Still, I’d like to do something faster, if we could. I think we’ll need it.”

“You think so?”

He told her about seeing Khembalung go under. Then his notions for dealing with the changing ocean, for clean energy, for really serious carbon drawdown from the atmosphere.

“So,” Diane said, “really you’re talking about global cooling.”

“Well, if we can warm it, maybe we can cool it too.”

“But the warming took a lot. The whole world’s economy, two hundred years.”

“Well, but just by accident though. The economy wasn’t dedicated to warming. It was just a byproduct.”

“Making things cooler might be harder than warming.”

“But if we actually direct part of the economy to that project. Like as if paying for a war or something.”

“Maybe.” She thought about it, shook her head as if freeing herself from the subject.

Then they talked about their pasts, in brief disconnected anecdotes. She described her children, Frank his parents. This seemed odd, but then she described her parents too; quite like his in some ways, it sounded. Her mother had been born in China, and Diane could do a funny imitation of her primitive English, “You go in street car squish you like bug!” After that Frank could hear better the Chinese accent in Diane’s own speech, which was perfectly grammatical and idiomatic, California Standard in fact, but with a lilt to it that he now understood better.

Then world events; problems in the Middle East; travels, New York; other meals in New York. They tried each other’s dishes, refilled each other’s wineglasses. They each drank half the bottle; then, over crème brûlée, sipped samples of cognac from a tray of ancient bottles offered for their inspection by the waiter.

Complex sensations, coursing through the sensorium. Some part of the parcellated mind watched all the parts coming together. Nice to be so here in the moment. Frank watched Diane’s face and felt something like the glow he had felt when she took his arm on the street. She too was enjoying herself. Seeing that was part of the glow. Reciprocity this kind of mutual enjoyment, he thought, only works if it is mutual. We live for this, we crave this. He felt a little vertiginous, as if climbing a hard pitch or maybe the Chrysler Building up the street. Aware of a risk.

He saw again how beautiful her arms were. This was an Optimodal thing; not just biceps but the whole upper arm, amazingly thick front to back, from shoulder to elbow; unlike anyone else’s arms. Gorgeous. It was different for everybody, what looked good to them. The argument that beauty corresponded to adaptive function was obviously stupid. Deviance from the norm was what drew the eye. Francesca Taolini had a crooked nose and various other asymmetries typical of narrow sharp-edged faces, and yet she was gorgeous; Diane had a blunt pentagonal face, perfectly symmetrical, and she too, while not as glamorous as Francesca, was yet still very attractive, one might even say charismatic. Yes, a true star that day at the UN. She drew the eye.

At a table near the door to the kitchen, another couple was having a similar sort of dinner, except they were much more demonstrative, more romantic; from time to time they even leaned together and kissed, in that New York way of pretending they were alone when they weren’t. Frank thought they were showing off, and turned his head away; Diane saw them and his response too, and smiled her slight smile.

She leaned over and whispered, “They have wedding bands.”

“Ah?”

“No way they are married to each other.”

“Ahhh,” Frank said.

She nodded, pleased by her deduction.

“The big city,” Frank said awkwardly.

“It’s true. I waited tables here for a while when I was going to school. I liked to guess the stories, like with these two, though this was easy. Usually it was harder. You only see an hour. But sometimes you can tell it’s an important hour. People forget to eat, or they cry, or argue. You could see the story. The other girls thought I was crazy, but it was just to be doing something.”

“Recreational anthropology.”

She laughed. “Yes, or Nancy Drew. Passing the time.”

Then they were done, the bill divided and paid. Out on the sidewalks she said, “Where are you staying?”

“The Metropolitan.”

“Me too. Okay. We can walk through the park and see if the ice skating is going yet.”

“It’s certainly been cold enough for it.”

As they walked into it, Central Park’s similarity to Rock Creek Park struck Frank. Flat terrain instead of a ravine, but they were still in a piece of the great eastern hardwood forest. It was very familiar.

“I’ve been spending time around the National Zoo,” Frank said impulsively. “It’s kind of like this.”

“What do you do there?”

“I’ve joined a group trying to keep track of the animals they haven’t yet recaptured.”

“That must be interesting.”

“Yes, it is.”

“And are you recapturing these animals?”

“Eventually I suppose they will. We’re mostly watching them now. It would be hard to trap some of them. The gibbons are my favorite, and they can get away from people very easily, but they’ll need some help with this cold.”

“I like their singing.”

“So do I!” Frank glanced down at her, suppressing several inane comments as they arose; in the end saying nothing. She walked beside him, relaxed and easy, short and solid, her dark hair gleaming where it reflected a distant streetlight or park light, seeming unaware of his gaze.

“Ah look, it is going. How nice.” She led him onto the bridge overlooking the northern bank of the ice rink. They leaned against it, watching New Yorkers expert and inexpert gliding over the illuminated white ice.

“Come on,” Diane said, tugging his arm. “I haven’t skated in years.”

“Ah God,” Frank said. “I’m terrible at it.”

“I’ll teach you.”

She took his rental boots from him, demanded a staffer and tighter pair from the help, then laced them up for him. “Nice and stiff, that’s the secret. Now just stand straight and set a line. Glide forward. Shift quickly back and forth.”

He tried it and it worked. Sort of. Anyway it went better than he remembered earlier times having done. He staggered around and tried not to fall, or run into anybody. Diane glided past from time to time, undemonstrative but deft, throwing him off balance every time he caught sight of her. She skated with him, held him up, helped him up, then took off and skated by, red-cheeked and grinning.

“Okay,” she said after a while. “I’m losing it here, my ankles are tired.”

“Mine are broken.”

“Ah.”

Back into shoes, back walking on the ground—stumping along, it felt, after the skating. Frank felt a little tense, and they drew apart as they walked. Frank searched for something to talk about.

They walked more slowly, as if to prolong the evening, or stave off an awkward moment. Two single adults, out on a date in Manhattan, with empty hotel rooms waiting, in the same hotel; and no one on Earth knew where they were at that moment, except them. The theoretical possibilities were obvious.

But she was his boss, and about a decade older than him. Not that that mattered—though it did—but it was the professional relationship that was the main thing, standing like the bottom half of a Dutch door between them. So much could go wrong. So much could be misinterpreted. They were going to be working together for the foreseeable future. And then there was Caroline too, the existence of Caroline which had changed everything in his life; except not, it seemed, the content of this parcel of it.

The incorrigible scientist inside him was trying to analyze the situation. Every street they came to had a red light, and there was time to think, perhaps too much time. Alpha females often led their troop in all the most fundamental ways, particularly matters of sexual access, meaning reproductive success. The alpha males—and really, in this situation Frank almost might be considered a beta male—they were almost ceremonial in their powers. They got what they wanted, but did not control the troop.

Well, whatever; at this moment that wasn’t really the point. He needed to know what to do. It was like being in high school. He had hated high school for this very reason.

Diane sighed. He glanced at her; she was smiling her little smile. “That was fun,” she said. “I never take time like this anymore.”

She was keeping a good distance between them.

“We’ll have to do it in D.C.,” Frank suggested. “Take a break.”

“That would be nice. We might even have outdoor ice skating this winter, if the forecasts come true.”

“Yes, that’s right. Out on the Potomac for that matter.”

Another block.

Frank said, “You do work long hours.”

“No more than anyone else.”

“I hear it’s a lot more.”

“Well, there’s a lot to do. Anyway, it won’t last much longer.”

She pointed down a crossing street this time, rather than nudging him along. “Down that way. The hotel’s at Fifty-first and Lex.”

“Ah yeah. What do you mean, not much longer?”

“Well, my term is almost up.”

“It’s a term?”

“Yes, didn’t you know?” She looked up at him, laughed at his expression. “Heading NSF is a presidential appointment, it lasts for six years. I have just over a year to go.”

They stopped in front of their hotel.

“I didn’t know that,” Frank said stupidly.

“They must have told you when you did the orientation.”

“Oh,” said Frank. “I missed some of that.”

“You blew it off.”

“Well, yes, a little bit, not all of it…”

She watched him, seeming amused but guarded. He had thought she was going to be his boss indefinitely. Now he had suddenly learned she was not as powerful as he had thought. And power is attractive. On the other hand, this meant she was not going to be his boss indefinitely, which meant that particular strangeness would go away, leaving them unconstrained by work issues—by the past in any manifestation—free to examine whatever was between them. So, less powerful in the pure sense, but less constrained in her relation to him; and how did these factors affect his feelings?

She was watching his face to see!

He didn’t know himself, so there was no way his face could show anything. But then that too must have been visible. And the unconscious mind—

He shivered at his own confusion, tried to smile. “So there’s light at the end of your tunnel,” he said.

“But I like the job.”

“Ah. Yes. Well… that’s too bad, then.”

She shrugged. “I’ll do something else.”

“Dang.”

She shrugged again. She was still watching him; interested in him. He wondered how much longer they could stand outside the hotel talking before it began to look strange.

“I want to hear more about this down in D.C.,” he said. “What you’re thinking of doing, and all.”

“Okay.”

“Good. Well, 6:00 train—shall we meet in the lobby and walk over to the station?”

“Sure. Five a.m. sharp.”

They turned together into the hotel and walked to the elevator. Up it went, opened at the third floor:

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

“That was fun.”

“Yes it was.”

When Charlie cleaned house he worked in a burst of maniacal effort powered by very loud music, making the event into a kind of indoor extreme sport, a domestic pentathlon performed in a last-minute attempt to stave off utter shabbiness. The ancient insane and incontinent cats, the ineradicable musk that the swimming tiger had left in the basement (perhaps contributing to the cats’ paranoia), Joe’s depredations and accidents, Nick’s absent-minded tendency to use the furniture as a napkin, for instance to clean his fork so as to keep his food pure; all these left marks. Even the divinely slovenly Anna left marks, dropping her clothing wherever she happened to take it off, depositing books and papers and mail wherever she finished with them—all behaviors in stark contrast to the extreme order of her abstract thinking—all these had an impact. And Charlie himself was disorganized in both the abstract and the concrete; so that eventually their house’s interior came to consist of narrow passageways through immense tottering middens of household detritus.

Charlie would therefore occasionally knock something over and block the way, notice the chaos, and freak out. He would leap into action, trying to rectify everything in a single morning. He had to begin by putting things away, to the extent possible, as all closets and drawers remained mysteriously full, middens of their own despite all that was strewn at large. However, he at least got things off the floors, into stacks on tables and dressers near where they were supposed to go. Then he cleaned the bathrooms and the kitchen, scrubbing madly; then it was time for vacuuming.

All this was Charlie’s version of the zen meditation practice called “chop wood carry water,” and he enjoyed it as such; but it had to be fueled by music or it was no good. Vacuum cleaning in particular needed music, fast intricate surging music that sounded good at high volume. The buzzsaw solos of Charlie Parker made an excellent vacuuming soundtrack, allowing Charlie to shout “Salt—PEEEEnuts!” over and over as he crashed about. Certain rock guitarists could of course push a vacuum as well; when Steve Howe was soloing the world practically vacuumed itself.

But the apotheosis of vacuum cleaning, Charlie had found over the years, was that part of Beethoven’s late work that expressed the composer’s sense of “the mad blind energy of the universe,” which was just what vacuuming needed. These movements, as defined by Beethoven’s biographer Walter Sullivan, who had identified and named the mode, were those characterized by tunes repetitive and staccato, woven into fugues so that different lines perpetually overlapped in dense interference patterns, relentless, machinelike, interminable. Possibly only a deaf man could have composed such music. The famous second movement of the Ninth Symphony was a good example of this mode, but to Charlie the two very best examples were the finale of the Hammerklavier sonata, opus 106, and the Grosse Fugue, originally the finale of string quartet opus 130, later detached and designated opus 133. The finale of the Hammerklavier was so difficult to play that concert pianists often gave up performing it years ahead of their full retirement; while the Grosse Fugue had caused the first quartet that attempted it to beg Beethoven to write a replacement finale more within human capacities—a request which Beethoven had granted with a laugh, no doubt foreseeing that quartet players in the future would end up having to perform both finales, compounding their problem.

In any case, the cosmic inexorability of these two huge fugues made perfect music to propel a vacuum cleaner around the house. And long ago Charlie had discovered by accident that it worked even better to play them both at once, one on the stereo upstairs, the other downstairs, with the volumes on both stereos turned up to eleven.

Joe of course loved this unholy racket, real big truck music, and he insisted on lending a hand with the vacuuming itself, causing Charlie to dodge and leap about to avoid trampling him, and to catch the machine if it got loose and began to drag the undetachable toddler down some lane of open space toward furniture or walls. After a few such mishaps Joe would usually hand it back over and follow Charlie around, slinging dinosaurs into the vacuum’s path to see if they would survive.

So, now a day came when Charlie was flying around the dining room, smashing chairs aside with the vacuum cleaner to make room under the table, lots of odd rattles and clunks under there as usual, glorying in the criss-cross of the two monster fugues, the way they almost seemed to match each other, the piano rippling up and down within the massed chaos of the strings, everything sounding wrong but right, insane but perfect—and then came that magic moment when both the hammering on the klavier and the grossness of the fugue quieted at the same time, as if Beethoven had somehow foreseen that the two pieces would he played together someday, or as if there was some underlying method in both, introducing a little eye to the storm before the exhilarating assault on all meaning and sense started to chomp away again—when Charlie looked around and saw that Joe was sitting on the floor of the living room, red-faced and open-mouthed, bawling his eyes out, unheard in the cacophony.

Charlie killed the vacuum cleaner, rushed over to turn off Charles Rosen, then slid across the hardwood floor to snatch the boy up in his arms.

“Oh Joe! Joe! What’s wrong, buddy? What’s wrong?”

Joe stuck out his lower lip. “Loud.”

“Oh God Joe I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But, you know—we’re vacuuming! It’s always loud when we vacuum the house.”

“Too loud,” Joe said, and whimpered pathetically.

Charlie hugged him, held him. “Sorry guy,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know. This is the way we’ve always done it before.”

And also, it seemed to him, in the past, if Joe had wanted something like the sound turned down, he would have let Charlie know by beating on his kneecap or launching a dinosaur at his head. Charlie was used to a very frank and open exchange of views with Joe, so that they would bicker with each other, sure, tussle, whack, yell—but cry? To have Joe Quibler whimpering in his arms pathetically, content to snuggle up against his chest… it was not right. And though it felt good to be able to comfort him, to rock him side to side in his arms, as he had many years before when trying to get Nick to fall asleep-—humming gently the main theme of the Grosse Fugue until the Arditti Quartet finished with it upstairs, then continuing to hum it, until it became something like a lullaby for infant robots—it was still extremely disturbing. It just wasn’t like Joe.

He sat down and for a long time hugged the child, communing. Then Joe looked up at the big front window, and his eyes grew round.

“Snow,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right, that’s snow! Very good Joe! I didn’t know you knew how to say that. It must be last winter since you saw snow, and you were just a baby then.”

Joe conducted the snow with outstretched arms, looking rapt, or maybe just stunned. “Snow go down.”

“It sure does. Wow, that’s pretty heavy for a first storm. It looks like it’s going to bury the house. I thought this was supposed to be global warming we were having.”

“Berry house?”

“No not really, I was joking there. It might come up to the windows though, see? I don’t think it will get any higher than that.”

“No?”

“Oh, well, no reason really. It just never does. At least so far. And cold dry winters are supposed to be the thing now. The great paradox. I guess it’s been kind of dry this fall. But now it’s snowing. When it snows it snows.” Charlie was used to babbling meaninglessly at Joe; they were privileged conversations, as between lawyer and client. It was actually a little bit disconcerting to have Joe be starting to understand what he was saying.

Joe kept conducting the snow, his hands making evocative little flutters downward.

Impulsively Charlie gave him another hug. The boy was hot as usual. Not by much, but Charlie could feel it. Anna was keeping a chart on him now, and she had established that he was hotter by day, just under a hundred, and a bit cooler at night, right over 98.6; average 98.9, she concluded after going through one of her statistical fits. It was a way of not thinking, Charlie thought. Quantification as coping. Charlie just felt the heat with his fingertips, as now. Joe shrugged him aside. He was more sensitive these days. Was that true? Well, there was this sudden aversion to Beethoven squared. But one of the weird things about living with a toddler was how fast they changed, and how hard it then became to remember what they had been like before the change, overwhelmed as that memory was by the present state, now so vivid to the eye. Probably Joe was different, because of course, he had to be different. He was growing up. He was adding several million brain cells an hour, and several hundred experiences.

And occasionally he burst out with a newly angry version of his old vehemence; so it wasn’t as if he were mellowing out. No one who knew him would put it that way. But before, he had been permanently and so to speak impersonally irritated, at the slowness of everything, perhaps; now when he got upset it appeared more deeply felt, and often directed at Charlie. It almost seemed as if he were unhappy. This had never been true before; Joe had been furious often, unhappy never. Even the thought of him unhappy cut Charlie to the quick. And fearful, needy, even affectionate… all these were strange things for Charlie to witness.

Now he watched Joe stare out the window at the falling snow: not writhing in his arms, not trying to throw anything, not bouncing around absorbed in solitary play, not babbling. Of course the snow was a startling sight, so fair enough. But Charlie was scared by the way Joe felt in his arms.

“Maybe we should go out there and play in the snow!”

“Okay.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun! We can dress warm and make a snowman. Throw snowballs.”

“Okay Da.”

Charlie sighed. No leap up, no marching to the door shouting GO GO GO with finger imperiously extended…

He got up and started to get them dressed. It was a long operation. It was eighteen degrees outside. Already he was thinking, fire in the fireplace, Thomas the Train on the carpet, snow drifting down outside the window. “We won’t be able to stay out long.”

The phone rang. “Oh, wait just a second here.”

Joe’s eyes bugged out in their old style. “Daaa! Wanna GO! GO!”

“Ha! I bet you do! Good for you! Just a second, ha ha. Hello?”

“Charlie it’s Roy.”

“Roy! How are you?”

“I’m fine you? This a good time?”

“No worse than usual.”

“Still suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous children?”

“Yes. Joe and I are about to go outside in the snow, but I can talk to you out there. Let me get my earplug in.”

“I won’t keep you long, you guys just keep doing what you’re doing. We’ve been talking about what Phil can say to counter the president’s people’s attacks. Now that he’s declared he’s running, they’re clearly concerned, and they keep saying that he’ll gut the economy in a futile attempt to reverse climate change.”

“As opposed to letting it continue on its merry way?”

“Yes. Adaptation opportunities are a big thing in certain think tanks now. There are regions due to see more productive climates, they say.”

“I’ll bet they do. Well, let’s hold them to that. Phil has to keep saying that getting right with the planet has become an industrial activity, and getting there first could be a spur to any nation’s economy. It’ll be like the dot com boom, only real.”

“Uh huh, uh huh, I’m writing all this down—”

“Yeah right.”

“—but why shouldn’t we just let private enterprise take care of it, like they say it will?”

“The free market is not good at disaster recovery. Catastrophe is not profitable.”

“But they say it is.”

“We’ll have to point out that it isn’t true.”

“Maybe that’s why we keep losing.”

“Think positive, Roy. Here, put your legs in first, it works better that way. It’s warmer. No way are we going outside unless you agree to put that on. You’re so funny!”

“Charlie, do you need to go?”

“No no. Hey, come on! No, not at all. Here we go. Now, what were we saying, that we’re doomed to lose this election?”

“No, it’s not that, I’m just trying to refine the message.”

“Job creation! Helping people get through the bad weather by stimulating these two new industries, adaptation, then mitigation.”

“The time for a Work Projects Administration may have passed.”

“Roy—”

“I’m just trying to see their next move!”

“You’re bumming me out. I’m out in the beautiful white snow, whee!”

“Ooh! Ooh!”

“Okay Charlie. Call me back, I don’t think my ear can handle you guys besporting yourselves like that.”

“Right, think it over and I’ll call you back. We won’t be out long. Oh but wait just a see—when I do call back, remind me we should talk about insurance, they might be interested hey Joe! Bye.”

“Bye.”

Charlie hustled after Joe, out into the street. Their street dead-ended right in front of their house, and there was a blanket of snow covering it. Joe kicked around in an ecstasy, his cheeks red, his eyes a brilliant blue. Charlie kicked around behind him, calling, “Go! Ha! Take that!”

Snow drifted down on them. It was cold but almost windless. Beautiful, really. Maybe they could adapt to any climate.

Well, but that was thinking about individuals, the body in its clothing. The support system more generally might not fare as well: food production, energy…

As he danced in the snow, Charlie considered what could be said to the American public to convince them they needed to elect Phil Chase as their next president, rather than the current happy occupant. Incumbents had an advantage; but the Republican party had stood firm, so far, on a policy of denying the existence of climate change. Surely the time was coming when they could be held to account for that heedlessness?

Maybe, maybe not.

The snow lofted down. Looking up it was strange to see so many tiny white missiles plunging down out of the gray cloud that covered the sky, flocking down in waves.

Individual flakes caught in Joe’s hair. His mittens were too big; he looked displeased and shook his hands. Angrily he tried to pluck the mittens off, one hand then the other, but both hands were equally impeded.

“DAAAA!”

“No, Joe, wait, don’t do that Joe, your hands will freeze. Cold! Cold!”

“Wanna! Wanna!” Joe flung his arms wildly around him, and off the mittens flew.

“Ah shit Joe. Come on. We’ll have to go back inside if you do that.”

“Wanna snow.”

Happily Joe scooped up loose snow and smooshed it into snowballs to throw at his dad. Quickly his hands turned pink and wet, but he didn’t seem to mind. Charlie helped him build a little snowman. Base, torso, head. The new snow cohered very nicely. Seed cones from a low branch for eyes. “Very cool.”

Joe stood facing it. He put his red wet hands together. “Namaste,” he said.

Charlie jerked upright. “What did you say?”

“No ma stay.”

“Oh! You want to go back inside?”

“Owee.” Holding out a red-and-white hand for Charlie’s inspection.

“I bet! That looks cold! That’s what I was telling you, about the mittens.”

“Too big.”

“Sorry. We’ll look for some smaller ones.”

Joe began kicking the snowman. Charlie watched him fondly, fully in the grip of the genomic sublime. This was his Joe, kicking his creation to pieces. Like a sand mandala poured into the river. Huge gusto when wiping a slate clean. His snowsuit looked like it was covered with wet diamonds.

“Come on, let’s go back inside. He’s all gone now. People won’t even know what we did. They’ll think that two big tigers have been out here wrestling in the snow.”

“Coo Da.”

Back inside they went to the kitchen and made hot chocolate. They took their cups out by the fire and put them on the coffee table, then wrestled casually, taking breaks to sip chocolate. Joe charged Charlie, slammed into him, then rolled away on the carpet, squealing happily; there was little he liked more, particularly when he knocked Charlie over. He growled like a dog, grunted like a martial artist, shrieked like a banshee; did not cry when he fell down.

Except this time he did. He bonked his head on the radiator and wailed. He just wasn’t as tough these days. It took quite a bit of hot chocolate to make it okay. Then it was back to rolling, growling, shouting “Ha!” or “Gotcha,” until they were content to lie there in a heap on the carpet. Charlie was exhausted; Joe faked exhaustion for a second, to show what a mighty ordeal it had been to defeat the monster, then sat playing with his trains, shaking his head and proclaiming “Po Da.”

The fire crackled. Outside the snow fell. Looking up at it from the floor, Charlie had the impression that it was aiming at him and just missing. Maybe this was just the way it was going to be now. Maybe that’s the way it had always been. People had lived cocooned in oil for a few generations, but beyond that the world remained the same, waiting for them to re-emerge into it.

Joe was staring into the fire. He whimpered, as in the last gulp of a cry. Charlie leaned over and hugged him, held him; the boy felt hot again, slightly sweaty. He twisted a little, trying to get comfortable, and Charlie resisted an urge to squeeze him tightly; he put his nose into the boy’s fine hair, breathed in the faint smell of infancy. All that was going away. He was filled suddenly with a fearful joy, beautiful but frightening, like the snow outside. Snow inside him. They leaned against each other. They sighed one of their synchronized sighs, the same breath filling them, then leaving in a prolonged exhalation. Joe and Da by the fire.