Fifty Degrees Below

VI. OPTIMODAL

Social Science Experiment in Elective Politics (SSEEP)

(notes by Edgardo Alfonso, for Diane Chang, the Vanderwal committee, and the National Science Board)

The experiment is designed to ask, if the scientific community were to propose a platform of political goals based on scientific principles, how would it be formulated, and what would the platform say?

In other words, what goals for improvement in society and government might follow logically from the aggregate of scientific findings and the application of the scientific method to the problem of change?

The platform could conceivably take the form of the “Contract with America” adopted by the Republican Party before the 1994 election (a kind of list of Things To Do):

“Contract with Humanity”

“Contract with the Children”

“Contract with the Generations to Come”

commitment to inventing a sustainable culture

(Permaculture, first iteration —what science is for)

Some kind of underlying macro-goal or foundational axiom set might have to be synthesized from the particulars of scientific practice and the composite standard model of physical reality expressed by the various disciplines.

1) One axiom or goal might be some form of the “Greatest good for the greatest number” rubric.

Without implying in any way that this “greatest good” could include or justify any planned or accepted structural or permanent disadvantaging of any minority of any size. As should be clear in the wording of the rubric, the greatest number is of course one hundred percent, including also the generations to come.

2) Even in the context of any religious or humanistic anthropocentrism, the life of our species depends on the rest of Earth’s biosphere. Even the utilitarian view of nature as something distinct and subservient to humanity must grant the biosphere the status of a diffused expression and aspect of our bodies. Interdependence of all the components of biosphere (including humanity) is undeniable. An observable, confirmable fact (breathing).

Given some version of these foundational axioms, the scientific community suggests these platform particulars for government: (preliminary partial list, please add to as you see fit)

“Contract with Our Children”

1. protection of the biosphere:

sustainable uses; clean technologies; carbon balance; climate homeostasis.

2. protection of human welfare:

universal housing, clothing, shelter, clean water, health care, education, reproductive rights.

3. full employment:

Current economy defines 5.4% unemployment as optimum for desired “wage-pressure balance,” treating labor (people) as a commodity and using a supply/demand pricing model. Five percent in U.S.A. = approx. fifteen million people. At the same time there is important work not being done.

If government-insured full employment reduced “wage pressure,” forcing a rise in minimum wages from the private sector, this would help pull millions out of poverty, decrease their government dependence and social service costs, and inject and cycle their larger incomes back into the economy.

4. Individual ownership of the majority of the surplus value of one’s labor.

People create by their work an economic value beyond what it costs to pay them and provide their means of production. This averages $66,000 per year for American workers, a surplus now legally belonging to owners/stockholders.

American workers therefore receive between a fifth and a third of the actual value of their work. The rest goes to owners.

A minimum share of 51% of the surplus value of one’s work should be returned to one, this value to be measured by objective and transparent accounting as defined by law.

3. and 4. combined would tend to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, by distributing the wealth more equitably among those who have created it.

5. Reduction of military spending

Match U.S. military expenditures to the average of other nations; this would halve the military budget, freeing over two hundred billion dollars a year.

More generally, all national militaries should be integrated in an international agreement upholding nonviolent conflict resolution. (Using black helicopters of course.)

Disproportionate size of U.S. military and arms industry a waste of resources. Doubling since September 11, 2001 resembles panic response or attempt at global hegemony. Results undermine goals outlined in the foundational axioms.

6. Population stabilization

Human population stabilized at some level to be determined by carrying capacity studies and foundational axioms. Best results here so far have resulted from increase in women’s rights and education, also a goal in itself thus a powerful positive feedback loop with chance for results within a single generation.

Context/ultimate goal: Permaculture

A scientifically informed government should lead the way in the invention of a culture which is sustainable perpetually. This is the only normative bequest to the generations to come. It is not adaptive to heavily damage the biosphere when our own offspring and all the generations to follow will need it, like we do, in order to survive. If reproductive success is defined as life’s goal, as it is in evolutionary theory, then stealing from descendants is maladaptive.

Protection of the environment, therefore, along with restoration of landscapes and biodiversity, should become one of the principal goals of the economy. Government must lead the way in investigating potential climate-altering strategies to mitigate current problems and eventually establish a balance that can be maintained in perpetuity.

Process Notes: how to enact platform.

Broader outreach. Public discussion. Performance evaluation methodologies. Scientific organizations and universities as information transmitters. Individuals in these organizations as catalysts in information cascade; also, candidates for elections and appointments. Advocacy.

Study governing methods in other countries to suggest possible reforms to our system where currently function (democracy) is impaired. Some candidates for study:

Swiss presidential model (executive council)

Australian ballot (preferential voting)

transparency in government (freedom of information, watchdog groups)

revolution (scientific)

Diane and the Vanderwal committee sat around the table in the meeting room next to Diane’s office. Some shook their heads as they read Edgardo’s draft; others just gave up, held their heads in their hands.

“Okay,” said Diane. “Anyone want to add anything else?”

The first big windstorm tore the last leaves off the trees in a rush. It was an amazing thing, and when Frank got out of his van the wind cut into him and he reached back for a windbreaker. The wind was loud in the branches, hooting and keening and whooshing like the roar of distant jets. He ran to the park and stopped on the overlook. Leaves tumbled down into the gorge, the stream was running with them; it looked like a million yellow paper boats had been launched and were now bouncing down the rapids together, covering the water entirely. Frank hooted loudly, “Oooooooop!” into the blanketing roar of the wind. Nothing would hear him. It was colder than it had yet been this year.

At his tree he called down Miss Piggy. He had to catch her on an inswing, and the climb was tough, up into piercing cold wind, swinging a little; then over the lip and onto the plywood, in his treehouse.

Only now it was like a crow’s nest, swaying back and forth on the top of the mast. “Wow!” He sat down, belayed himself to the railing. Was it going to be possible to get used to this? He watched the wind toss the forest about. The canopy was a network of black branches and twigs bouncing vigorously in place, a few stubborn leaves flapping like prayer flags. Strong gusts caused the network to course and flow like seaweed in a current, then rebound to their usual violent fluttering in place.

His own tree moved gently back and forth. Rock a bye baby. It seemed like it would be okay. He was liking it already. “Ooooop!”

He crawled over to his duffel, opened it and pulled out his largest tent, a North Face South Col. It was very strong and stable, therefore quiet, as tents went. It was meant for two people and a lot of gear.

He screwed ringbolt screws into the plywood, measuring carefully and staking down the tent as he went to make certain it was stretched out tautly.

He pulled the tent poles into their sleeves and posted them into their grommets, leaning into the windswept fabric of the tent until they were secure and all was well. He stepped in; it was really big for a two-person tent, expedition scale for sure, with room to stand right at the high point, sloping quickly down to the four corners. Nylon blue, and in the lantern’s glow the color of twilight. It smelled like the mountains.

He moved his duffel and the rest of his stuff inside. Zip the door shut, zooop! and he was in a nylon-walled room. Like a kind of yurt. People had lived in yurts through entire ice ages. This one swayed, but that still seemed okay. It reminded him of waterbeds, back in the day. Rock a bye baby!

He pulled out his sleeping bag, sat on his groundpad, draped the bag over his legs. Arranged his pillows. Everything was slightly blue, including his laptop screen. He regarded all of it with pleasure; this was the bedroom he loved most in all the world, the only constant in all his years of wandering. Nothing lacking, everything at hand, the taut walls curving up aerodynamically.

He got comfortable and tapped around on the laptop. A little reading to help him to sleep. An article in Nature, linking paleoclimate and human evolution in a manner similar to the killer frisbee guy’s argument: many rapid and severe fluctuations in climate had islanded small human numbers in various refugia, where gene pool and behavioral pockets survived in isolation. When the weather improved, these were the only people left. Thus ice ages as repeated selectors for flexibility, innovation, and cooperation.

Another altruism-as-adaptation argument, in other words. Frank wasn’t sure it made the case that cooperation had been key. It was a group selection argument, and evolutionary theory was still struggling with the concept of group selection, as opposed to the solid case for kin selection, which one tended to see everywhere in nature. Living things would clearly sacrifice for their kin; whether they would for their group was less sure.

Still, it was interesting to think about. And it combined in a very interesting way with another article in Nature, describing the latest in game theory studies of altruism. Prisoner’s dilemma was part of it, of course; this simple game had been studied for decades. Two prisoners, kept separately, were asked to testify against the other, to benefit themselves. Rewards were quantified for easy computer trials: if both refused to defect, each earned three points; if they both defected, they earned one point; if one defected and the other didn’t, the defector got five points while the sap got zero. A simple game, with a simple if depressing result: in most scenarios one accumulated points fastest by always defecting.

But there were other strategies that sometimes outperformed always-defect, expressed for the computer trials as algorithmic formulas, but given names like tit-for-tat, or firm-but-fair, or irregular firm-but-fair, or even always-generous, which under certain circumstances (climate fluctuation?) could create an upward spiral of maximizing points for both players.

This Nature article described some new experiments. Researchers had first tried the game using only always-defect and always-generous strategies—in essence, parasites and hosts. As predicted by previous results, the defectors took over the system; but the average fitness of the population then dropped.

A variant of the game was then introduced, called Snowdrift, in which players were supposedly stuck in cars in the snow, and could either get out and shovel, or not. The generous got points even if the other defected, because eventually their car would be clear. Here cooperators and defectors coexisted stably, in a mix determined by the details of the game rules.

The researchers then mapped the Snowdrift results onto a graph program, finding long tendrils of association between clusters of cooperators. When the tendrils were cut by rule changes, the clusters were destroyed by defectors. The implication was that islanding was dangerous, and that some rules allowed cooperation to prosper while others didn’t. It was also interesting to consider what the analog of tendrils would be in real-world situations. Extending help to people from other groups, perhaps—as Anna had, for instance, when welcoming the Khembalis into her family’s life after they appeared in the NSF building. This kind of generosity could be explained as group selection, but only if the definition of the group was enlarged, perhaps even by some leap of the imagination. Empathy. Someone in the Journal recently had suggested this was the story of human history so far, successive enlargement of the sense of the group.

The authors of this Nature article went on to tentatively suggest that generosity which held no advantage at all to the giver might be structurally sounder in the long run than generosity that brought some kind of return to the cooperator. The paper concluded with the reminder that at the beginning of life, RNA had had to cooperate with proteins and other molecules to band together and form cells. So clearly cooperation was a necessary component of evolution, and a strong adaptive strategy. The authors of the paper admitted that the reasons for the success of cooperation were not well understood. But certain proteins now ubiquitous in cells must have gotten there by being always generous.

Falling asleep in his tent, swaying gently, Frank thought: Now that is interesting … suggestive … something to be tried. I will be like that protein … or like Anna at work … I will be always generous.

Winter came.

His treehouse was now visible from the ground, if one knew what to look for. But who was looking? And if anyone saw it, what could they do about it?

Theoretically someone could lie in wait nearby, then arrest him or ambush him. But as he hiked in the park under the bare-limbed skeletal trees, over ground thick with rime-frosted and snow-drifted leaves, he could see sometimes half a mile in all directions, and in truth the park was nearly depopulate. He was much more likely to see deer than people. The only humans out in the area near his treehouse tended to be park staff or other FOG volunteers; and many of these were acquaintances by now. Even strangers did not represent a danger, during the day anyway. People out there in winter were often interested in being alone. You could tell when you spotted them whether this was true or not, in another of those unconscious calculations that the savannah brain was so good at. But mostly he just saw deer. He hiked the empty forest, looking for the aurochs and seeing only deer; although once he spotted what looked to him like an ibex, and Nancy ID’ed as a chamois.

The other ferals he spotted were often suffering from the cold, and the sudden absence of leaves. Many of these animals were tropical or subtropical, and even if they could have withstood the cold, the disappearance of the leaves meant their food was gone. Seeing an eland snuffling in a pile of leaves packed into a windrow gave one a new respect for the native animals, who could survive such drastic changes in the environment. It was a tough biome, and the natives were tough customers. The coyotes were even getting kind of brash.

The zoo staff and FOG were now recapturing every endangered feral they could. The ones that remained elusive, or seemed to be doing okay, were aided by heated feeding stations. These were mostly simple two-walled shelters, Ls with their open sides facing south. Frank helped build some, lifting panels and beams of playground plastic to be screwed into place. A few shelters were three-walled, and had trap doors suspended over their open sides, so that the zoo staff could capture animals inside them. None of the FOG members liked it, but it beat a mass die-off.

So now there were parts of the park that seemed like an open-air or unwalled zoo, with animals of many different species hanging out near the shelters and visiting when their kind of food was put out. It looked to Frank like these creatures felt they had returned to the zoo already, and were content to be there.

But not all the ferals came in from the cold. And some of the stubbornest animals were among those least capable of surviving. The gibbons and siamangs were only going to the shelters that did not have trapdoors, and leaving them as soon as they had eaten. The gibbons continued to brachiate through the leafless trees. The siamangs had been seen walking around, their long arms raised over their heads to keep them from dragging on the ground; it looked like they were trying to find someone to surrender to, but if they saw people approaching they tarzanned away at high speed.

Both species were also now joining the ferals who were venturing out of the park into the residential neighborhoods nearby, finding sources of heat and food on their own; one siamang had been electrocuted while sleeping on a transformer, but now the rest didn’t do that anymore. The gibbons Bert and May and their sons had been reported sleeping in a kid’s backyard tree house.

“If they obviously don’t want to be recaptured,” Frank said to Nancy, “then we should help them from the shelters and let them stay feral.” He knew most of the FOG membership felt the same.

But Nancy only said, “I’m afraid that unless we bring them in, we’ll lose a lot of them.”

December days were too short. He tried to get in a brief animal walk at dawn; then it was over to work, where things were hectic as always. Along with the Gulf Stream project, Frank’s committee was involved with organizing a series of trials of various clean energy sources, especially solar; they were trying to determine which was closest to ready for mass production, the latest photovoltaics or flexible mirrors that redirected sunlight to elements that transformed the heat to electricity. Both showed some promise, and trials of the Stirling transformer were making the mirrors look unexpectedly competitive, although the various photovoltaics were always gaining in efficiency, and getting cheaper too. It seemed that one system or other might soon be ready for mass deployment, which would greatly reduce the amount of carbon still being tossed into the atmosphere.

Into these and other matters Frank threw himself, and the work days passed in their usual rush; and then in the dusk, or in full dark, he hiked down into the park and climbed his hanging ladder.

Recline on his groundpad, then, in the open doorway of his tent. Only when it was windy did he retreat fully inside. As long as the air remained still, his heavy sleeping bag had kept him warm on climbs in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic; it would do the same here. And the nights were too beautiful to miss. The highest branches spiked around him like a forest of giant thorns, the stars brilliant through their black calligraphy. He watched the stars, and read his laptop, or a paperback set under the lantern, until sleep came on him; then snuggled into the bag; slept well; woke serene, to the sight of the treetops bobbing and rustling on the dawn breeze. Lines of blackbirds flew out of town to look for food, under a flat sky of pewter and lead. Really the important thing was to be out in the world, to feel the wind and see the full spaciousness of being on a planet whirling through space. A feeling of beatitude; was that the right word? Sit up, click on the laptop, google “beatitude”; then there on the screen:

“beatitude dips from on high down on us and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds.”

My. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from a website called Emersonfortheday.net. Frank read a little more: quite amazing stuff. He bookmarked the site, which apparently featured a new thought from the philosopher’s writings every few days. Earlier samples read like some miraculously profound horoscope or fortune cookie. Reading them, Frank suddenly realized that the people who had lived before him in this immense hardwood forest had had epiphanies much like his. Emerson, the great Transcendentalist, had already sketched the parameters or the route to a new kind of nature-worshipping religion. His journal entries in particular suited Frank’s late night go-to-sleep reading, for the feel they had of someone thinking on the page. This was a good person to know about.

One night after he fell asleep skimming the site, his cell phone jolted him awake. “Hello?”

“Frank, it’s Caroline.”

“Oh good.” He was already sitting up.

“Can you come see me, in the same place?”

“Yes. When will you be there?”

“Half an hour.”

She was sitting on the same bench, under the bronze dancer. When she saw him approaching she stood, and they embraced. He felt her against him. For a long time they breathed in and out, their bodies pressed together. A lot was conveyed, somehow. He could feel that she had been having a hard time—that she was lonely—that she needed him, in the same way he needed her.

They sat on the bench, holding hands.

“So,” she said. “You’ve been traveling.”

“Yes?”

“Boston, Atlanta—Khembalung, even?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“But—I mean—I told you this Pierzinski was probably the reason you were listed, right? And Francesca Taolini is on the list too?”

“Yes, you did.” Frank shrugged. “I needed to talk to them. I couldn’t do my job without talking to them. So I thought I’d go ahead, and see if you noticed any, I don’t know—change in my status or whatever.”

“Yes. I did.”

“So, were we taped?”

“No. You mean beyond your office phones? No. Not yet.”

“Interesting.”

She gazed at him curiously. “You know, this could be serious. It’s not a game.”

“I know that, believe me. I’m not thinking of it as a game. More like an experiment.”

“But you don’t want to draw any more attention to yourself.”

“I suppose not, but why? What could they do to me?”

“Oh I don’t know. Every agency has its inspector general. You could suddenly find your travel expenses questioned, or your outside consulting. You could lose your job, if they really wanted to make it happen.”

“Then I’d just go back to UCSD.”

“I hope you don’t do that.”

He squeezed her hand. “Okay, but tell me more. How did my status change exactly?”

“You went up a level.”

“So my stock rose?”

“It did. But that’s a different issue. Your stock rose, fine, but that means it hit an amount that triggered your level of surveillance to go up. At that level, you’ll have more intrusive methods applied to you. It’s all set in the programs.”

“But why, what for?”

“I’m sure it’s something to do with Pierzinski, like you said last time. Taolini was really googling him after your trip to Boston, him and you both.”

“She was?”

“Yeah. She called up pretty much everything you’ve ever published. And lots of Pierzinski too. What did you two talk about?”

“She was on the panel I ran that reviewed Pierzinski’s proposal.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So, we talked about the work he’s doing, stuff like that.”

“She looks like she’s cute.”

“Yes.”

He didn’t know what to say. She laughed at him, squeezed his hand. Now that he was with her he understood that the others were all just displacements of his real desire. “So my calls are being recorded?”

“Your office calls, yes. I told you that last time.”

“I guess you did. And my cell phone?”

“They’re being recorded now too, but so far no one’s actually checking them. They’re just saved in your file. If you went up another level or two, they’d be there, and they’d get reviewed.”

“And what about my FOG phone?”

“No, not that one. Isn’t that just a walkie-talkie system?”

“Yeah.”

“Those only work off one tower. I have to call your cell, but I don’t like doing that anymore. I’m calling you from public phones, so someone would have to make a complete search of your file to find me, but I’m in there if they look hard enough. If someone knows my voice… Meanwhile, they can tell where you were when you got calls because of the towers involved.”

“So you know where I am?”

“To an extent. Your van is tagged too. I can see you’re spending time over near Rock Creek Park. Have you got a place over there?”

“Yes.”

“You must be renting a room? There aren’t any home arrangements showing. No water or electric or home phone or sewage.”

“No.”

“So you’re renting a room?”

“Like that, yes.”

She considered him. She squeezed his hand again. “I … well. I hope you trust me.”

“Oh I do. It’s just that I’m, I don’t know. Embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

“Yes. Only not really.” He met her gaze. “I live in a tree house. I’m out in Rock Creek Park, living up in a little tree house I built.”

She laughed. Then she leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Good for you! Will you take me up to it sometime?”

“Oh yes,” he said, warming. “I’d like that very much.”

She was still leaning into him. They leaned, wordlessly feeling the pressure of arm against arm. Then they shifted, and suddenly were kissing.

It all came instantly back to him, how it felt. He fell headlong back into the space they had occupied when they were trapped in the elevator, as though the intervening months had vanished and they were back there again in an eternal now, passionately making out. Nowhere but in their little bubble universe.

After some indeterminate time, they paused for breath. Such intensity could not be maintained; it had to lead somewhere else, either forward to orgasm or backward to talk. And since they were out on a park bench; since there were still so many questions pricking at other parts of his mind; he fell back toward talk. He wanted to know more—

But then she pulled him back to her to kiss again, and obviously that was a much better idea. Passion blew through him again, sexual passion, my God who could explain it? Who could even remember what it was like?

Again it went on for some time, he couldn’t have said how long. The night was cold, her fingers were cool. The city rumbled around them. Distant siren. He liked the feel of her body under her clothes: ribby ribs, soft breasts. The iron solidity of her quads. She squeezed him, gasped and murmured a little, all through their kisses.

Again they came up for air.

“Oh my,” she said. She shifted on the bench, conformed herself to him like a cat.

“Yes.”

His questions slowly resurfaced. He looked down at her face, tucked against his shoulder.

“Are you staying with your friends again?”

“Yes.” She looked at her watch. “Uh oh.”

“What time is it?”

“Four.”

“Wow. The witching hour.”

“Yes.”

“When do you have to be back?”

“Soon.”

“And … look, is there some way I can call you? Is your phone tapped?”

“Maybe.” She hesitated. “I don’t want to use it for anything important.”

“Ah.” He thought about it. “There must be some protocols you guys use…”

She shook her head quickly. “It really isn’t like that in my department. Although sure, there are methods. We could use phone cards and public phones.”

“We’d have to synchronize.”

“Right, but mat’s part of the method.”

“Fridays at nine kind of thing.”

“Right. Let’s do that. Let’s find pay phones we think will work, maybe get a few numbers from a few in a row, so mere would be alternates. We’ll share them next time I get a chance to call you, and after that we won’t be putting anything on your phone. You might get bumped up again any time, the way things are going in the market. You guys are really impressing the investors.” She looked at her watch. “Ah hell.”

She twisted into him, kissed him again. “Hmmm,” she said after a while. “I’ve gotta go…”

“That’s okay.”

“Sorry.”

“I understand. You’ll call?”

“Yes. When I can. Get those pay phone numbers ready.”

“I will.”

One last kiss and she was off into the night.

OOOP OOP!

Now Frank went fully optimodal. For a few days he even experienced the “walking on air” phenomenon, which was surely a physiological effect caused by an incomplete integration of happiness into sense data. Life in his tree, in the winter forest, at the gym, at work, in the restaurants he frequented, out in the brief hour of pale winter evening sun, running or throwing the disks or stalking animals—every day parcellated but full, every night a forest adventure, always alive, always generous. Ooop!

How big the world became in a wind. Everything expanded, inside and out. Hike in the dreamlike black forest, huge and blustery. Evening sky over the black branches, violet in the east shading to aquamarine in the west, all luminous, a Maxfield Parrish sky, only now it was obvious that Parrish had never exaggerated at all, but only done his best to suggest a reality that was so much more vivid and intense than any art.

One evening he tromped into 21 not long after sunset and found only Zeno and Redbeard and Fedpage and a couple more. “Where is everybody?”

“Over on Connecticut.”

“Seeking the heat, man.”

“What about Chessman, where’s he?”

Shrugs all around.

“Haven’t seen him for a while.”

“I bet he found a place to stay for the winter. He’s smart.”

“Come and go, Doctor Checkmate, come and go.”

Frank couldn’t read their attitude. He wondered if the chess hustlers at Dupont Circle might know where Chessman was, and resolved to visit and see. There was nothing more to be learned here.

Snow began to fall, small flakes ticking clown. After the first heavy snowfall there had been little more of it; and it was usually this kind of frozen frost, swirling on the wind. The bros noted it gloomily, then wandered off. They had actually built the little shelters Zeno had proposed, Frank saw, in the dip they now called Sleepy Hollow, just to the west of the site. Some of them were already tucked into their low shelters, staring out red-eyed at the fire and the snowflakes. Cardboard, trashbags, branches, sheets of plywood, drop cloths, two-by-fours, cinder blocks: under that, dirty nylon or even cotton sleeping bags, toeing into snowbanks. You needed a groundpad under a sleeping bag for it to work.

Frank found himself annoyed. Living like rats when they didn’t have to; it was incompetent. Even if it was all they could find to build with.

It was hard to judge what was happening with them. One time Frank was running with the frisbee guys, completely absorbed in it, when they came into 21 and there was a quartet of young black men, wearing multiple cotton hooded sweatshirts, hands deep in their pockets. Spencer pulled up sharply and turned to the tables. “Hey how’s it going?”

“Oh good!” Zeno said sarcastically. “Real good! These brothers are wondering if we have any drugs to sell.”

“You guys?” Spencer laughed, and Robert and Robin echoed him as they flanked him on both sides, their golf disks held before them like Oddjob’s hat. Frank was just comprehending the situation when the young men joined the laughter, smiles flashing in the gloom, and headed down Ross without a farewell.

“Catch you guys,” Spencer said as he moved on to the next tee.

“Yeah, catch you,” Zeno growled. “Fucking drop by any time.”

At work that week, a group from NOAA came over to share their analysis of the Gulf Stream stall. They had done the calculations and modeling necessary to say something quantitative about the idea of restarting the far north down-welling, and Diane had asked General Wracke and several members of the Science Board to attend. The NOAA PI ran them through a quick recap of the problem: fresh-water cap introduced onto the surface of the far north Atlantic, reducing salinity and raising the water temperature both; normal temperatures for this month averaged -1.2° C, so melted ice actually warmed it. Density was a function of salinity and temperature combined, which was why the movement of seawater was called the thermohaline cycle. Before the fleet of Arctic icebergs had arrived, the surface in the downwelling regions had had an average salinity of 31.0 p.s.u. (practical salinity units; these were measured in various ways, but a p.s.u. was still roughly equivalent to how many grams of salt per kilogram of water). Now the surface salinity was 29.8, the temperature -1.0° C. Following the PI’s red laser dot down the isopycnals on her graph, they could see just how much salinity would have to be bumped to make the cap dense enough to sink down into the water underneath it.

The biggest downwelling region had been north of Iceland and east of Greenland, but the PI explained that all that region was not equally involved. Currents branching from the great current had flowed north and east almost to the coast of Norway, then turned left toward Greenland in very predictable currents, slowing and then swirling down in giant whirlpools that were thirty or fifty kilometers wide, but only three or four centimeters deep. These whirlpools were visible only to satellite laser altimetry, where false-color graphing could make them psychedelically obvious. They had been relatively stable in location, presumably constrained by the sea bottom, the nearest coastline configurations, the force of the currents, and the Coriolis force.

They were small areas compared to the total surface of the ocean, so that the idea of restarting the current did not seem immediately impossible; but as the PI pointed out, one could not restart the circulation merely by increasing density at the old downwelling sites in isolation, separated from the thrust of the Gulf Stream by some hundreds of kilometers of stalled and unusually fresh water. It would be necessary to draw the full momentum of the Gulf Stream back up to the old sites again, by causing surface water to sink just north of the current downwelling sites, then continue the process, in Pied Piper fashion, until they had drawn the Gulf Stream up behind them and could dump as much as needed in the old downwelling locations. This was the only method that the NOAA team could think of to renew the flow; but it added greatly to the amount of water that they had to make sink. To “isopycnalate,” as Edgardo called it.

Extensive computer modeling of various scenarios had led them to believe that in order to create the masses of sinking water necessary, they would have to alter its salinity about two p.s.u., from 29.8 to 31.6—meaning the addition of about two grams of salt for every kilogram of water they had to alter. The necessary volume of water was a much less certain thing, depending as it did on various assumptions plugged into the model, but the minimal volume they had gotten to get good results totaled approximately five thousand cubic kilometers of water. About a thousand kilograms per cubic meter of water, depending on temperature; two grams of salt per kilogram of water … thus, about ten billion kilograms of salt.

Five hundred million tons.

Someone whistled.

“Just how much salt is that?” Frank asked.

Edgardo and General Wracke laughed. Diane smiled but said to the NOAA people, “Can you give us a sense of what that means in terms of volumes, availability, shipping capacities and so on?”

“Yes, I’m sure we can. We would have done that already but we just finished the analysis this morning. But I have to say, you know, before we get to that part, that we’re still very uncertain about the wisdom of trying this at all. I mean we don’t really know what effect it will have, and just going by the law of unintended consequences—”

“Please!” Edgardo said, raising a hand. “No more of this law of unintended consequences! There is no such law. You hear this said and then you look for the equation that expresses this law, or even the principle, and there is no equation or principle. There is just the observation that actions have unintended consequences, though sometimes they matter and other times they don’t. It’s like saying ‘Shit happens.’ ”

“Okay, maybe you’re right. Although shit does happen.”

“Just look into the practicalities of gathering and moving that quantity of salt,” Diane said with her little smile. “It may be completely impossible, in which case no consequences will follow.”

At night the trees of the forest were bare black statues, fractal and huge. There were points from which one could see down great lengths of the gorge. The snow was still rather thin on the ground, drifted into banks against the flood windrows and then icing over, leaving uneven layers of slimy black leaves underfoot. The resulting black-and-white patchwork made the topography of the park almost impossible to read, a kind of Rorschach space in which the tossing branches of the canopy were the best way to stay oriented to the ravine’s forms. The wind hooted and roared like the air choir of the world, gibbons had nothing on the winter forest as far as vocalizations were concerned. Ooooooooooooooooo!

Bouncing patterns, shifting whether he walked or not, and yet somehow the brain made the picture cohere. But sometimes it didn’t, and briefly he would be in an abstract world, all pattern, shifting shifting—ah, that was the Military Road bridge—and then a sudden understanding of what he was seeing would snap back into place with its customary “you are here” function. It was remarkable just how much understanding one lost when the visual field went haywire like that—not just what one saw, but where one was, who one was; a glitch in which everything blanked for a moment, pure consciousness caught in a mystery—then bang, all the explanations falling back in at once, leaving only a faint memory of absence.

He was the paleolithic in the park. A recent article in The Journal of Sociobiology had reminded him of the man in the ice, a man who had died crossing a Tyrolean pass some five thousand years before. He had lain there frozen in a glacier until something, perhaps global warming, had caused him to emerge and be discovered, in 1991. All his personal possessions had been preserved along with his body, giving archeologists a unique look at the technology of his time. Reading the inventory of his possessions, Frank had noticed how many correlations there were between his own gear and the man in the ice’s. Probably both kits were pretty much what people had carried in the cold for the last fifty thousand years.

The Alpine man had worn a coat made of sewn furs, the stitching very fine, all similar in design and effect to the down jacket Frank was wearing at that very moment. The Alpine man had worn a fanny pack like Frank’s, filled with several small tools that added up to the equivalent of Frank’s Swiss Army knife. The Alpine man’s unfinished bow stave and copper-headed axe (a marvel) had no ready equivalent in Frank’s equipment, though the axe resembled the ice axe he kept in his tree house; and he had taken to carrying his Acheulian hand axe around with him, in his fanny pack or even sometimes in his hand, just for the pleasure of the heft of it. It might even do a little good, in terms of personal defense; there were more and more people in the park, including some little gangs that did not look good to Frank. Not to mention the jaguar.

The Alpine man had worn a backpack made of wood and fur, quite similar in design to Frank’s nylon backpack; inside it were stuff sacks. A birch bark container had been designed to carry live embers, and there was also a little stone bowl in which to place flammable stuff to light by striking flints; all that equivalent to Frank’s handy cigarette lighter. Frank also had a little Primus stove up in the tree house, a primitive-looking steel thing that roared like a blowtorch and was almost as hot. How the Alpine man would have loved that! In effect Frank had a little bottle of fire he could light anywhere. The technological sublime indeed, when he had a little pot of coffee or soup on the boil.

The Alpine man had also carried a flat circular piece of white marble, holed through its middle. A loop of leather ran through the central hole, and a number of smaller leather loops were tied around through the main loop: this “tassel” as the archeologists called it, looked to Frank like a sling of carabiners. It was the one possibly nonutilitarian piece on the man (though his skin had also displayed tattoos). The birch fungus in his fanny pack had perhaps been medicinal, like the aspirin in Frank’s bathroom bag.

All down the list, familiar stuff. People still carried around things to do the same things. Frank’s kit had a provenance of thousands of years. It was a beautiful thought, and made him happy. He was Alpine man!

And so when he hiked into site 21 and saw again the bros’ ramshackle shelters, he said, “Come on guys. Let’s try to get up to paleolithic code, eh? I brought along a roll of ripstop nylon this time, check it out. First class army-navy surplus, it’ll match your camo flak jacket color scheme.”

“Yarrrr, fuck you!”

“Come on, I’m going to cut you all a tarp off the roll. Everyone in the park is under this stuff but you.”

“How you know?”

“You Santa Claus?”

“He knows because he give it to them all is how.”

“Yeah that’s right. Just call me Johnny Appletent.”

“Har har har! Perfesser Appletent!”

They cackled as he measured out rectangles of about ten by six, then cut them off with the scissors on his Swiss Army knife. He showed them how the nylon could be secured, in many cases right on top of their already existing shelters. “Dry means warm, bros, you know that.” A well-set tarp was a complete home in itself, he told them. Sides down to the ground, suspend the middle on a line, high enough to sit up in at one end, don’t worry about how low the rest of it was. The lower the warmer, except don’t let it come down on the bottom of the sleeping bag. Get plastic to put under the bags for God’s sake.

It was the kind of camp work that Frank enjoyed. He wandered around among them as they fiddled, evaluating their obstacles and the solutions they were concocting to circumvent them. They were inept, but it was a learned skill. Winter camping. Maybe they had only stayed out in the summertime before, and in previous winters sought conventional shelter. Winter backpacking was a very technical matter—well, ultimately simple; but it took attention to detail, it was a meticulous thing if you wanted to stay comfortable. A technique. The Alpine man would have been superb at it. And now they were all being carried up to the heights.

The bros lay there watching him or not, Andy calling “Watch out, will ya.” Some lit cigarettes and blew plumes of smoke onto the new insides of their tarps, frosting them grayly.

“The first wind’ll knock that down on you,” Frank warned Andy. “Tie that far corner out to that tree.”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Here, I am going to save your lazy ass.”

They all laughed at this.

“He’s saving us now! Look out!”

“Preacher Pastor Perfesser.”

“Yeah right!” Frank objected. “The Church of Dry Toes.”

They Eked this.

By the time all the tarps were set Frank’s hands were white and red. He swung them around for a while, feeling them throb back to life, looking around at the scene. You could see another fire down toward the zoo.

He bid them goodnight. They mumbled things. Zeno said, “Nyah, get your ass outta here, quit bothering us with your crap, goddamn Peace Corps bleeding heart charity pervert think you know what you’re doing out here fuck that shit, get outta here.”

“You’re welcome.”

Another night, through the snowy forest under a full moon: a solid snowfall had come down at last, and now surreal whiteness blanketed everything, every bump and declivity suddenly defined by the snow’s infinitely shaded luminosity. Low cloud, noctilucent on the western half of the sky, every black stroke of branch and twig distinct against it, wind and even a bit of snow whirling down, the flakes catching the moonlight and sparking like bits of mica among the stars. The world all alive. “The great day in the man is the birth of perception.” (Emersonfortheday, February 22nd)

Frank had taken his snowshoes and ski poles out of the storage unit in Arlington, and now he cruised over the drifts. In many places the snowshoes were not needed, but they saved him from postholing into taller drifts, so they were worth it.

No need to turn on his miner’s headlamp tonight! It was light you could read by.

He came on a black thing half-buried in snow. He stopped, fearing some child had died of exposure, thinking of Chessman. But when he knelt by the form he saw that it was a wombat. “Ah shit.”

Two, actually. Mother and infant, it looked like. Frank called in the GPS location on his FOG phone, cursing sadly as he did. “God damn it. You poor guys.”

It looked like Nancy was right. They needed to recover the warm weather ferals. “Yeah,” she confirmed when he called her next day, “a lot of them aren’t making it. The shelters are helping, but we really have to bring them back in.”

“I hope we can,” Frank said.

At work Frank continued to hack away at his list of Things To Do, which nevertheless continued to grow at the bottom faster than he removed things at the top. Settling in after a session at Optimodal, his days for a while were mostly concerned with:

1) arranging small business exploratory grants for the photovoltaic programs with the most robust results. These were getting rather exciting, actually. Progress in this field was measured by efficiency and, cost. Efficiency as the percentage of photonic energy striking the cell transferred to electrical energy, now reaching well above forty percent; and cost, now down to six cents per kilowatt-hour, very competitive with any other form of energy generation. Switching over to solar would be a major expense, but after that the possibilities were somewhat staggering. One of the grantees calculated that it would soon be possible, theoretically, to power the entire country from a ten-mile by ten-mile photovoltaic array located in some sunny desert location in the Southwest.

2) keeping in touch with the people establishing the Max Planck equivalent in San Diego. This was proceeding nicely, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography had pitched in to help, seeing that a federal research center in climate issues would very often require their help, and send funding their way, becoming another component of the already powerful UCSD research complex. The old Torrey Pines Generique facility was being remodeled and equipped, and a lot of hires about to be made. The people involved were already aware of Yann, Marta, and their colleague Eleanor, and were preparing a salary and research funding offer for all three, a really impressive package deal.

3) consulting with the various people in-house trying to deal with the SSEEP melodrama, already a mess. The platform had been released as a National Academy of Sciences study, but the connection to NSF was well-known. Scientific organizations and op-ed pages had weighed in on the matter of a “scientific political platform”—whether it was possible, whether it was a good idea, whether it was dangerous, either to science or society. Some of the usual suspects in the science world had quickly disavowed any knowledge of such a program, attacking it as unscientific and inappropriate; while others had surprised Frank by welcoming the move and suggesting additions and modifications to the platform. Attacks in Congress and the press were common, and sometimes exhibited the kind of spluttering rage indicative of a fear-based response. Phil Chase had immediately embraced the platform as a scientifically backed version of what he had been advocating for many years. As he was emerging as the clear frontrunner in the race for the Democratic nomination, outraising a tired and undistinguished pack of competitors two-to-one even when all their contributions were combined, this looked to Frank to be an interesting convergence of political forces.

4) Looking into a new analysis of the Sekercioglu study which had claimed that the bird extinctions they were now seeing on every continent, up to two thousand species in the coming century, were going to leave gaps in ecological function so serious that whole biomes might crash. Things like pollination and dispersal of seed, predation and fertilization, the list went on. At first it seemed odd to think of birds as so crucial, but of course they were very ancient elements of the system. So Frank got to think about the algorithms used in biodiversity studies, a welcome dip into math and theory—and damned if the corridors in habitat network theory didn’t look just like the tendrils in Snowdrift, in the version of the game in which always generous prospered.

5) Investigating amorphous or glassy metals, in particular amorphous steel, made by a new method that scrambled the atomic structures of the metal by yttrium, chromium, and boron, making the resulting “glassy steel” stronger, nonmagnetic, and less corrosive. The Navy was interested in making ship hulls of this stuff, and it seemed to the materials team working with Frank that all kinds of ocean-proofed machinery could perhaps be improved, enough so that practical methods of tapping into the ocean’s energy might be built.

6) Talking to General Wracke over the phone about the salt-mining and transport capabilities of modern civilization. Wracke was upbeat; the quantities being discussed were not completely off the charts when compared to the amount of oil shipped around the globe, and the oil tanker fleet included a significant percentage of single-hulled ships due to be replaced, or rather overdue. As for salt availability, they were still looking into it, but as the general said, “There’s a lot of salt in this world.”

Money was a different matter. The Pentagon had recently gotten in trouble with Congress, Wracke said, for its practice of hiding money left over at the ends of budget years, then using these savings for its own purposes, calling them “reprogrammed funds.” Congress did not approve, and any high-profile project was likely to have to get conventional funding.

“Does it look like it will be expensive?” Frank asked.

“Depends what you call expensive. Billions for sure.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“I’ll get back to you on that.”

“Thanks. Oh—different subject—does the Pentagon have an intelligence service of its own?”

Wracke laughed. “Is that a trick question?”

“No, how could it be?”

“You’ll have to ask the CIA about that. But yes, sure. After the other intelligence agencies in this town let us down so bad, we almost had to have one, to get good data. We were the ones getting killed you know. So there’s the Strategic Support Branch, and they’re an intelligence-gathering unit publicly acknowledged. They’re sometimes a bit more hands-on than the other agencies, but gathering intelligence is their job. Why, is there some secret climate group you’re having trouble with? Clandestine cloud seeding?”

“No no. I was just curious. Thanks. See you at the next meeting.”

“I look forward to it. You guys are doing great.”

In that same couple of weeks, along with everything else, Frank made an effort to locate Chessman. He centered the search on Dupont Circle, because that was the city’s outdoor chess epicenter. So much so, he found, that chesshounds converged on it from everywhere, and of course dispersed back out, using all eleven of the streets that met there. To ask about a young black kid was to ask about more than half the chess-playing population, and no one appreciated an inquiry framed that broadly. His motives also appeared to be questioned. So after a while, rather than ask, Frank simply walked and watched, played and lost and walked again, checking out the games, noting also the new little semi-winterized shelters popping up here and there all over town.

Cleveland Park sported many of these camps, especially in the fringe of buildings damaged by the flood and abandoned. Spencer’s crowd, clearly, as well as others less organized and competent. It seemed from his observations that the homeless population of Northwest alone must be in the thousands. The formal shelters and newspaper reports gave similar numbers. Between the Klingle Valley Park and Melvin Hazen Park, both small tributary ravines dropping into Rock Creek, there were many abandoned houses. If they had not been burned out, or even if they had, squatters were likely to be occupying them.

This made for a very quiet neighborhood. No one wanted to attract the attention of the police. Any lit windows Frank gave a wide berth on principle, and so apparently did everyone else. Good avoidance protocols make good neighbors. Chessman might be tucked away in one of these hulks, but if so Frank wasn’t going to find out by knocking on doors or looking in windows.

And he doubted the youth would be in any of them anyway. Chessman had had a healthy propensity for staying outdoors.

That being the case, where was he?

Then Frank ran into Cutter out on Connecticut, and a tendril connected two parcels in his mind. “Cutter, do you know what happened to Chessman?”

“No, I ain’t seen him lately. Don’t know what happened to him.”

“Do you know anyone who might?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Byron, he used to play chess with him. I’ll ask.”

“Thanks, I’d appreciate that. Do you know what his real name was, by chance?”

“No, only thing I heard him called was Chessman.”

Out in the park proper the forest now seemed wilderness, with most human sign snowed over or overgrown or flooded away. It was a whole world. Firelight in the distance the only touch of humanity. A kind of Mirkwood or primeval forest, every tree Yggdrasil, and Frank the Green Man. Encountering a structure now was like stumbling on ruins. The Carter Barron amphitheater and the huge bridges south of the zoo looked like the work of Incans or Atlanteans.

The campfires in the park, unlike the squatter houses, could be investigated. It was possible to approach them surreptitiously, to put them under surveillance, to see if any of the little firelit faces were known to him. Stalking, pure and simple. Peering around trees, over flood snags, now flanked by snowdrifts. Rain had hardened the snow. Stepping through the crust made a distinct crunchy noise. One had to float on top with one’s weight on the back foot until the next step was pressed home. Time for the tiger mind to come to the fore. Someone had reported seeing the jaguar, east of the park.

Once he came on a single old man shivering before a smoky little blaze, obviously sick, and he roused him and asked him if he could get himself out to one of the homeless shelters on Connecticut, or the ER at the UDC hospital; but stubbornly the old man turned away from him, not quite coherent, maybe drunk, but maybe sick. All Frank could do was call 911 and give GPS coordinates, and wait for an EMS team to hike in and take over. Even if you were healthy, living out here was a tenuous thing, but for a sick person it was miserable. The paramedics ended up talking him onto a stretcher and carrying him out. The next night Frank passed by again, as part of his rounds, to see if the man had returned and if he was okay. No one there, fire out.

And never a sign of Chessman. The longer it went on the less likely it seemed Frank would ever find him. He must have moved to a different part of the city, or out of the metro area entirely.

One evening before climbing into his tree house Frank hiked under the moon, in a stiff north wind that tossed the branches up and down and side to side, a glorious skitter-skatter of black lines against gray sky. When he headed north the wind shoved his breath right into his lungs. How big the world seemed with the moonlight on the snow.

Then he came over the rise next to site 21 and saw around its fire shouting figures, fighting furiously. “Hey!” he cried, rushing down in a wild glissade. Something hit the fire and sparks exploded out of it; Frank saw a figure swing something to hit one of the prone bros, and as Frank plunged through the last trees toward him, shouting and pulling the hand axe from his fanny pack, the man looked up and Frank saw suddenly that it was the crazy guy who had chased him off Route 66 in his pick-up truck. Frank screamed and leaped forward feet first, kicking the man right above the knees. The man went down like a bowling pin and Frank jumped up over him with the hand axe ready to strike, then the man rolled to the side and Frank saw that he was not in fact the driver of the pick-up, he had only looked like him. Then Frank was down.

He was on his knees and elbows and his hands were at his face, trying uselessly to catch the rush of blood from his nose. He didn’t know what had hit him. Blood was shooting out both nostrils and he was also swallowing it as fast as he could so that he wouldn’t choke on it. He felt nothing, but blood shot out in a black flood, he saw it pool on the ground under him. He heard voices but they sounded distant. Don’t, he thought. Don’t die.

Charlie was startled out of a dream in which he was protesting, “I can’t do it, I can’t—” and so his first words into the phone no doubt sounded like an objection: “Ha, what, what?”

“Charlie, this is Diane Chang.”

Charlie saw his bedside clock’s red 4:30 a.m. and his heart pounded. “What is it?”

“I just got a call from the UDC Hospital. They told me that Frank Vanderwal was admitted to their ER about three hours ago with a head injury.”

“How bad is it? Is he all right?”

“Yes, but he has a concussion, and a broken nose, and he lost a lot of blood. Anyway, I’m going there now, I was just leaving for work anyway, but it’ll take me a while to get to the hospital, and I realized it’s near you and Anna and that you know Frank. You guys were the second number on his who-to-call form. So I thought you might be able to go over.”

“Sure,” Charlie said. “I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

Anna was sitting up beside him, saying “What, what is it?”

“Frank Vanderwal’s been injured. He’ll be all right, but he’s over at UDC Hospital. Diane thought—well here.” He handed her the phone and got up to dress. When he was ready to go Anna was still on the phone with Diane. Charlie kissed the top of her head and left.

He drove fast through the nearly empty streets. In the hospital ER receiving room the fluorescent lights hummed loudly. The nurses were matter-of-fact, pacing themselves for the long haul. They treated Charlie casually; people came in like this all the time. Finally one of them led him down the concrete-floored hallway to a curtained-off enclosure on the right.

There Frank lay, pale in his hospital whites, wired up and IVed. Two black eyes flanking a swollen red nose, and a bandage under his nose covered much of his upper lip.

“Hey Frank.”

“Hey, Charlie.” He did not look surprised to see him. Behind his black eyes he did not look like anything could surprise him.

“They said your nose is broken and you’ve been concussed.”

“Yes, I think that’s right.”

“What happened?”

“I tried to break up a fight.”

“Jesus. Where was this?”

“In Rock Creek Park.”

“Wow. You were out there tracking the zoo animals?”

Frank frowned.

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

“No, I was out there. Yes. I’ve been out there a lot lately. They’ve been trying to recapture the ferals, and they don’t all have radio collars.”

“So you were out there at night?”

“Yeah. A lot of animals are out then.”

“I see. Wow. So what hit you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Well, let’s see … I saw a fight. I ran down to help. Some people I know were being attacked. Then something hit me.”

“Never mind,” Charlie said. Thinking seemed to pain Frank. “Don’t worry about it. Obviously you got hit by something.”

“Yes.”

“Does your face hurt bad? It looks terrible.”

“I can’t feel it at all. Can’t breathe through it. It bled for a long time. It’s still bleeding a little inside.”

“Wow.” Charlie pulled a chair over and sat by the bed.

After a while a different nurse came by and checked the monitor. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Strange. Am I concussed?”

“Yes, like I told you.”

“Anything else?”

“Broken nose. Maxillary bone, cracked in place. Some cuts and bruises. The doctor sewed you up a little inside your mouth—there, inside your upper lip, yes. When the anesthetic wears off it will probably hurt more. Sorry. We put some blood back in you, and your blood pressure is looking, let’s see … good. You took quite a whack there.”

“Yes.”

The nurse left. The two men sat under the fluorescent lights, among the blinking machinery. Charlie watched Frank’s heartbeat on the monitor. It was fast.

“So you’ve been going into Rock Creek Park at night?”

“Sometimes.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

Frank shrugged. “I didn’t think so. A lot of the animals are nocturnal.”

“Yes.” Charlie didn’t know what to say. He realized he didn’t know Frank all that well; had met him only in party contexts really, except for the trip to Khembalung, but that had been a busy time. Anna collected odd people, somehow. She liked Frank, always with an undercurrent of exasperation, but he amused her. And Nick really enjoyed doing the zoo thing with him.

Now he fell asleep. Charlie watched him breathe through his mouth. Strange to see such a distant and even self-contained person in such a vulnerable state.

Diane arrived, then Anna called as she was getting Nick up for school, wanting to know how Frank was. Frank woke up and Charlie handed his phone to him; he now looked slightly embarrassed, and definitely more alert. “Conked in the nose,” he was saying to Anna as Diane pulled Charlie out into the hall. “I don’t remember very much.”

“Listen,” Diane said, “Frank only had a driver’s license and NSF card on him, and both had his address from last year. Do you know where he’s living now?”

Charlie shook his head.

Diane said, “He told me he had found a place over near you.”

“Yes—he’s been joining us for dinner sometimes, and I think he said he had a place over near Cleveland Park, I’m not sure.” Frank seldom talked about himself, now that Charlie thought of it. He looked at Diane, shrugged; she frowned and led him back to Frank’s bedside.

Frank handed Charlie his cell phone. Anna wanted Charlie to come home and watch Joe, so she could visit the hospital.

“Sure. Although I think they’re going to release him soon.”

“That’s good! Well, maybe I can drive him home.”

Charlie said, “Anna says she’ll come over and be able to give you a ride home when you’re released.”

Frank nodded. “I’ll have to get my van. She can drive me to it.” He frowned suddenly.

“That’s fine, we’ll take care of that. But I wonder if you should drive, actually.”

“Oh sure. It’s just a broken nose. I have to get my van.”

Charlie and Diane exchanged a glance.

Charlie said hesitantly, “You know, we live near here, maybe we could help you get your van to our place, and you could rest up there until you felt well enough to drive home.”

“It doesn’t actually hurt.” Frank thought it over. “Okay,” he said at last. “Thanks. That would be good.”

Frank was discharged that afternoon, by which time Anna had visited and gone on to work, and Charlie had returned with Joe. Before going out to get his car, Charlie checked at the desk. “I’m driving him home. Did he give you a home address?”

“4201 Wilson.” That was the NSF building.

Charlie thought about that as he drove Frank back to their house. He said, “I can take you home instead if you want.”

“No that’s okay. I need to be taken back to my van so I can pick it up.”

“There’s no rush with that. You need some food in you.”

“I guess,” Frank said. “But I need to get my van before it gets towed. Tonight is the night that street has to be cleared for the street cleaners.”

“I see.” How come you know that, Charlie didn’t say. “Okay, we’ll get it first thing after dinner. It shouldn’t be that late.”

The other Quiblers had welcomed Frank in with a great fanfare, marveling at his bulbous red nose and his colorful black eyes. Anna got take-out from the Iranian deli across the street, and after a while Drepung dropped by, having heard the news. He too marveled as he scooped clean the take-out boxes; Frank had had little appetite.

In the kitchen Charlie told Drepung about Frank’s mystery housing. “Even Diane Chang didn’t know where he lives. I’m wondering now if he isn’t living out of the back of his van. He bought it right after he left his apartment in Virginia. And he knows which night of the week the street he’s parked on gets cleaned.”

“Hmmm,” Drepung said. “No, I don’t know what his situation is.”

Out at the dining room table Drepung said to Frank, “I know you are from San Diego, and I don’t suppose you have family in this area. I was wondering if, while you are convalescing, you would move in with us at the embassy house.”

“But you have all those refugees from the island.”

“Yes, well, but we have an extra bed in Rudra Cakrin’s room, you see. No one wants to take it. And he is studying English now, as you know, so…”

“I thought he had a tutor.”

“Yes, but now he needs a new one.”

Frank cracked a little smile. “Fired another one, eh?”

“Yes, he is not a good student. But with you it will be different. And you once told me you had an interest in learning Tibetan, remember? So you could teach each other. It would help us. We can use help right now.”

“Thanks. That’s very kind of you.” Frank looked down, nodded without expression. It seemed to Charlie that the concussion was still having its way with him. And no doubt a monster headache. Drepung went to the kitchen to boil water for tea. “Not Tibetan tea, I promise! But a good herb tea for headache.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “Thanks. Although I don’t really have a headache. I’m not sure why. I can’t feel my nose at all.”