Fifty Degrees Below

VII. THE COLD SNAP

The weather got worse. The new year’s January saw:

High temperature in London for the week of Jan. 10, -26° F. In Lisbon, a 60 degree drop in 7 minutes. Snow in San Diego, snow in Miami. New York Harbor froze over, trucks drove across. Reunion Island: 235 inches of rain in ten days. In Montana, temp dropped 100°’ F in 24 hours, to -56° F In South Dakota the temperature rose 60 degrees in 2 minutes. On Hawaii’s big island, 12 inches rain in an hour. In Buffalo, New York, 30 foot snowdrifts, all from snow blown in from frozen Lake Erie, on 60 mph winds. Reindeer walked over fences from the zoo and went feral. On the Olympic peninsula in Washington, a single downdraft knocked over forest trees estimated at 8 million board feet of lumber.

In a North Sea storm similar to that of 1953, Holland suffered four hundred dead and flooding up to 27 miles inland.

February was worse. That February saw:

A storm in New England with 92 mph winds. Waterloo, Iowa, had 16 days straight below 0° F. 7 inches snow in San Francisco. Great Lakes totally frozen over. Snow in L.A. stopped traffic. Ice in New Orleans blocked the Mississippi River. -66° F in Montana. 100 mph winds in Sydney, Australia. Feb. 4, 180 tornadoes reported, 1,200 killed; named the “Enigma Outbreak.”

A low-pressure system experiencing extremely rapid intensification of the kind called “bombogenesis” brought 77 inches of snow in one day, Maine. Storm surge was 12 foot high. Reunion Island, 73 inches rain in 24 hours. Winds 113 mph in Utah. Rhine floods caused 60 billion dollars damage. An Alberta hailstorm killed 36,000 ducks.

A thunderstorm complex with winds of hurricane force, called a derecho, struck Paris and surrounding region, $20 billion in damages. 150 mph wind storm in Oslo. Two Bengal tigers escaped a Madison,

Wisconsin, zoo in a tornado. Thousands of fish fell in a storm on Yarmouth, England.

165 mph winds make a category 5 storm; there had been three in U.S. history; two struck Europe that February, in Scotland and Portugal.

At that point they were only halfway through February. Soon it would be Washington’s turn.

During 1815’s “year without summer,” after the Tambora volcano exploded, temperatures worldwide lowered by 37° F average.

As soon as he felt he could make an adequate display of normality to the Quiblers, Frank thanked them for their hospitality and excused himself. They regarded him oddly, he thought, and he had to admit it was a bit of a stretch to claim nothing was wrong. Actually he felt quite bizarre.

But he didn’t want to tell them that. And he didn’t want to tell them that he had no place to go. So he stood in their doorway insisting he was fine. He could see Anna and Charlie glance at each other. But it was his business in the end. So Charlie drove him down to his van, and after a final burst of cheerful assurances he was left alone.

He found himself driving around Washington, D.C. It was like the night he lost his apartment; again he wasn’t sure what to do. He drove aimlessly, and without deciding anything, found himself back on the streets west of Rock Creek Park.

His nose and the area behind it were still numb, as if shot with Novocain. He had to breathe through his mouth. The world tasted like blood. Things out the windshield were slightly fogged, slightly distant, as if at the wrong end of a telescope.

He wasn’t sure what to do. He could think of any number of options, but none of them seemed quite right. Go back to his tree? Drive to the NSF basement? Try to find a room? Return to the ER?

He had no feeling for which course to pursue. Like the area behind his nose, his sense of inclination was numb.

It occurred to him that he might have been hit hard enough to damage his thinking. He clutched the steering wheel as his pulse rose.

His heartbeat slowed to something more normal. Do anything. Just do anything. Do the easiest thing. Do the most adaptive thing.

He sat there until he got too cold. To stay warm on a night like this one he would have to either drive with the heater on, or walk vigorously, or lie in the sleeping bag in the back of the van, or climb his tree and get in the even heavier sleeping bag there. Well, he could do any of those, so…

More time had passed. Too cold to stay still any longer, he threw open the driver’s door and climbed out.

Instant shock of frigid air. Reach back in and put on windpants, gaiters, ski gloves. Snowshoes and ski poles under one arm. Off into the night.

No one out on nights like these. At the park’s edge he stepped into his snowshoes, tightened the straps. Crunch crunch over hard snow, then sinking in; he would have posted through if he had been in boots. So the snowshoes had been a good idea. Note to self: when in doubt, just do it. Try something and observe the results. Good-enough decision algorithm. Most often the first choice, made by the unconscious mind, would be best anyway. Tests had shown this.

Out and about, under the stars. The north wind was more obvious in the Rock Creek watershed, gusting down the big funnel and cracking frozen branches here and there. Snaps like gunshots amidst the usual roar of the gale.

No one was out. No fires; no black figures in the distance against the snow; no animals. He poled over the snow as if he were the last man on Earth. Left behind on some forest planet that everyone else had abandoned. Like a dream. When the dream becomes so strange that you know you’re going to wake up, but then you discover that you’re already awake—what then?

Then you know you’re alive. You find yourself on the cold hill’s side.

Back at site 21. He had come right back to the spot where he had gotten hurt, maybe it wasn’t wise. He circled it from above for a while, checking to be certain it was empty. No one out. What if you had a world and then one night you came home to it and it was gone? This sometimes happened to people.

He clattered down to the picnic tables, sat on one, unbuckled his snow-shoes. He looked around. Sleepy Hollow was empty, a very unappetizing snowy trench with black mud sidewalk, the sorry little shelters all knocked apart. Tables bare. The fire out. Ashes and charcoal, all dusted with snow.

Strange to see.

So … He had run in from the direction of the zoo. Knocked one of the assailants down; funny how that skinny face and moustache had fooled him, taken him back to an earlier trauma; but only for a second. Facial recognition was another quick and powerful unconscious ability.

So. He had to have been about… about here when he was struck.

He stood on the spot. It did not seem to be true that the memory held nothing after such impacts; he actually recalled a lot of it. The moment of recognition; then something swinging in from his left. A quick blur. Baseball bat, branch, maybe a two-by-four… Ouch. He touched his numb nose in sympathy.

After that moment there were at least a few seconds he did not recall at all. He didn’t recall the impact (although he did, in his nose, kind of; the feel of it) nor falling to the ground. He must have gotten his hands out to catch himself; his left wrist was sore, and the first thing he remembered for sure was kneeling and seeing his nose shoot out blood like a fountain. Trying to catch black blood in his hands; not staunch it, just catch it; finding it hard to believe just how much blood was pouring through his hands onto the ground, also down his throat and the back of his mouth. Swallowing convulsively. Then touching his nose, fearing to know what shape his fingers might find; finding it had no feeling, but that it seemed to be occupying much the same space as before. Peculiar to feel his own nose as if someone else’s. It was the same now. His fingers told him the flesh was being manipulated, but his face didn’t confirm it.

Very strange. And here he was. Back on the spot, some days later … let’s see; must be … two days.

He crouched, looked around. He got on his hands and knees, in the same position he had been in while watching the blood fountain out of him. It was still seeping a little bit. Taste of blood. For a second during the prodigious flow he had wondered if he would bleed to death. And indeed there was a large black stain on the ground.

Now he twisted slowly this way and that, as if to prick more memories to life. He took off a glove and got his little keychain flashlight out of his pocket. He aimed the beam of light; frail though it was, it made the night seem darker.

There. Off to his right, up the slope of snow, half embedded. He leaped over with a shout, snatched it up and shook it at the wind. His hand axe.

He stared at it there in his hand. A perfect fit and heft. Superficially it looked like the other gray quartzite cobbles that littered Rock Creek. It was possible no one would ever have known it was different. But when he clutched it the shaping was obvious. Knapped biface. Frank whacked it into the nearest tree trunk, a solid blow. Thunk thunk thunk thunk. Quite a weapon.

He put it back in his jacket pocket, where it jostled nicely against his side.

He hiked through the trees under bouncing black branches, their flailing visible as patterns in the occlusion of stars. The north wind poured into him. Clatter and squeak of snowshoes. He slept in his van.

Inevitably, he had to explain what had happened to a lot of people. Diane of course had seen him at the hospital. “How are you feeling?” she asked when he went into Optimodal the next morning.

“I think a nerve must have been crushed.”

She nodded. “I can see where the skin was split. Broken nose, right?”

“Yes. Maxillary bone. I just have to wait it out.”

She touched his arm. “My boy broke his nose. The problem is the cartilage heals at new angles, so your breathing could be impaired.”

“Oh great. I hate having to breathe through my mouth when I have a cold.”

“They can ream you out if you want. Anyway it could have been worse. If you had been hit a little higher, or lower—”

“Or to either side.”

“True. You could have been killed. So, I guess your nose was like the air bag in a car.”

“Ha ha. Don’t make me laugh or I’ll bleed on you.” He held his upper lip between thumb and forefinger as he chuckled, squeezing it to keep from reopening the vertical cut. Everything had cracked vertically.

“Your poor lip. It sticks out almost as far as your nose. You look like the spies in ‘Spy vs. Spy.’ ”

“Don’t make me laugh!”

She smiled up at him. “Okay I won’t.”

In his office about twenty minutes later, he smiled to think of her; he had to press his upper lip together.

His appreciation for Diane grew as he saw more of the responses he got to the injury. Oversolicitous, amused, uninterested, grossed out—they were bad in different ways. So Frank kept discussions limited. The lunch runners were okay, and Frank told them a bit more about what had happened. Same with the frisbee guys, who all nodded rather grimly as they listened to him. There had been quite a few incidents like the fight Frank had joined, Spencer said: robbery, assaults, site stealing. For a while it had been really bad. Now, as the news of these attacks spread, and the cold got worse, the park had lost a lot of people, and the fights were fewer. But they hadn’t ended, and the frisbee guys were now telling everybody to move around in packs.

Frank did not do this, but when he strapped on his snowshoes and went for walks, he kept away from the trails and did his best never to be seen.

Work was more problematic. When he sat down in his office, the list of Things To Do sometimes looked like a document in another language. He had to look up acronyms that suddenly seemed new and nonintuitive. OSTP? PITAC? Oh yeah. Office of Science and Technology Policy. Executive branch, a turned agency, an impediment to them. There were so many of those. PITAC: President’s Information Technology Advisory Council. Another advisory body. Anna had a list of over two hundred of them, followed by a list of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) just as long. All calling for some kind of action—from the sidelines. Unfunded. Anna had waved a whole sheaf of lists in her hand, not appalled or angry like Frank had been, more astonished than anything. “There’s so much information out there. And so many organizations!”

“What does it all mean?” Frank had said. “Is it a form of paralysis, a way of pretending?”

Anna nodded. “We know, but we can’t act.”

The phrase, something Diane had once said, haunted him as he tried to get back to work. He knew what should come next for most of the items on his list of Things To Do, but there was no obvious mechanism for action in any case; nor any way to decide which to do first. Call the science and technology center coordinator’s office, and see if the leasing of Torrey Pines Generique’s empty facility was complete. Call Yann, and therefore Marta; put them directly in touch with the carbon drawdown and sequestration team. Talk to Diane and General Wracke about the Gulf Stream project. Check in with the carbon emissions team, see if photovoltaics clearly outperformed mirrors before dropping the mirror funding. Okay but which first?

He decided to talk to Diane. She could not only update him, but advise him on how to prioritize. Tell him what to do.

Again Diane was easier to talk to than anyone else. But after she told him what she had heard from Wracke and the Coast Guard and the International Maritime Organization, all of which seemed to indicate that assembling a transport fleet, loading it and sailing it to the Greenland Sea would be at least physically possible, she shifted to something else with a quick grimace. Their new Inspector General appeared to be on the hunt, and the pattern of his interviews and requests seemed to indicate that Diane herself was his quarry, along with several of the most active members of the National Science Board, including its best contact to National Academy of Science, and the one with the strongest links to the Senate. “I’ve got to meet with OMB and have it out with them,” she said darkly. “Maybe call in the GAO for a cross-check to this guy.”

“Is there any chance he’ll…”

“No. I am clean. They are looking at my son’s affairs too. All the program directors; you too, I assume. We will hope for the best. They can twist things that are real, and suddenly you’re in trouble.”

“Oh dear.”

“It’s all right. I can get some help. And the colder it gets this winter, the better for us. People are getting motivated to try something. If it comes out that the Department of Energy is trying to stop us from helping the situation here, they will catch hell. So, the colder the better!”

“Up to a point,” Frank warned.

“True.” She looked over his list. “Talk to your carbon drawdown people, we need to get them to commit to the new institute in San Diego.”

“Okay.” That meant a call to Yann and Marta.

Back in his office, Anna was waiting to discuss their alliances program. She was pleased with a search program that was identifying groups tightly allied to NSF’s current goals. Also, FCCSET had been funded and given back its budgetary power, and should be able to coordinate climate spending from the federal government, including the Corps of Engineers. It looked like even if the President and Congress refused all funding for climate work, still engaged in their head-in-the-sand exercise, they could be bypassed by a more diffuse economic network, now interested in taking action.

So that was nice; but Frank still had to call Marta. It was amazing how his pulse rose at the prospect. His lip throbbed with each heartbeat. Every other item on the list seemed suddenly more pressing. Nevertheless, he took a deep breath and punched the number, wondering briefly how much this would bump his stock in the futures market. Why, if only he could get some shares, he could do things to raise their value, and then sell! Maybe this was what was meant by the ownership society. Maybe this was capitalism; you owned stock in yourself, and then by your actions the price per share rose. Except that you didn’t own a majority share. You might not even own any shares, and have no way to buy in; as with Frank and the spooks’ virtual market.

But there were other markets.

Marta picked up, and Frank said, “Hi Marta it’s Frank,” all in a rush. Forging on through her cold greeting and lack of conversation, he asked her how it was going with the lichen project.

She told him that it was going pretty well. “Do you have a cold?”

“No.”

They had engineered one of their tree lichen’s algae to a much more efficient photosynthesis, and altered the fungus component of the lichen so that it exported its sugar to the tree faster than the original lichen had. This lichen had always taken hormonal control of its trees, so now the sugar production from photosynthesis was merely being packed into the lignin of the trees faster than before; meaning extra carbon, added to the trees’ trunk girth and root size. So far the alterations had been simple, Marta said, and the trees would live for centuries, and had millions of years’ experience in not getting eaten by bacteria. The sequestration would therefore last for the lifetime of the tree—not long on geological scales, but Diane had declared early on in this discussion that the length of sequestration time was not to be a heavily weighted factor in judging the various proposals; any port in a storm, as she put it.

“That all sounds great,” Frank said. “And which trees do these tree lichen live on?”

They were pretty much omniarboreal, Marta said. Indigenous to the great world-wrapping forest of the north sixties latitudes, crossing Europe, Siberia, Kamchatka, and Canada.

“I see,” Frank said.

“Yeah,” Marta replied, suddenly chilling. “So what’s up?”

“Well, I wanted to let you know that the new center is ongoing out in San Diego. You aren’t going to believe this, but they’re going to lease the old Torrey Pines Generique facility.”

“Ha! You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“Well. You ought to hire Leo Mulhouse too while you’re at it. He’d get a cell lab working better than anyone.”

“That’s a good idea, I’ll pass that along. I liked him.”

Frank described the input from UCSD, Scripps, Salk, the San Diego biotech council. Then he told her about the progress with NSF’s unsolicited grants program. “There’s already a Small Grants for Exploratory Research program that’s been underutilized, and Diane has upped the maximum award. So the possibility is there for grants without external review.”

He couldn’t say any more; indeed, even saying this much might be dangerous: surveillance, recorded phone line, conflict of interest, hostile inspector general … shit. He had to leave the rest unsaid, but the implications seemed pretty damned obvious. And headhunting was still legal, he assumed.

“Yeah it sounds good,” Marta said sullenly, clearly in no mood to be grateful, or to hope. “So what?”

Frank had to let it go. He didn’t say, You’re going to have to be part of a government to get permission to release a genetically modified organism designed to alter the composition of the atmosphere. He didn’t say, I’ve arranged things so that you and Yann can both go back to San Diego and work on your projects with more power and funding. She could figure it out, and no doubt already had, which was what was making her grumpy. She didn’t like anything that might impede her being mad at him.

He stifled a sigh and got off as best he could.

One windless night he snowshoed out and saw that some of the fires were back. Sparks in the darkness, at picnic sites and squatter camps. People out and about. Perhaps it was the lack of wind.

Under the luminous cloud the snow was a brilliant white. The forest looked like the park of some enormous estate, everything groomed perfectly for a demanding squire. Far to the north a movement in the trees suggested to him the aurochs, or something else very big. The jaguar wouldn’t be that big.

The bros were back home, he was happy to see, several of them sitting at the picnic tables, a few standing by a good fire in the ring.

“Hey Perfesser! Perfesser Nosebleed! How ya doing, man?”

They did not gather around him, but for the moment he was the center of attention. “I’m okay,” he said.

“Good for you!”

“You look terrible!”

“Now’s when you should pop him on the nose if you were ever gonna!”

Frank said, “Oh come on.”

“I don’t have to ask who’s winning now! The other guy’s winning!”

Frank said, “Don’t make me laugh or I’ll bleed on you.”

This pleased them very much. They went on ragging him. He threw a branch on the fire and sat down next to the woman, who nodded her approval as she counted stitches.

“You did good,” she told him.

“What do you mean?”

“The bozos here say you came blasting in like the cavalry.”

“So who were those guys?” Frank asked the group.

“Who knows.”

“Fucking little motherfuckers.”

“It’s one of them Georgia Avenue gangs, man, those guys just live off the streets like us, or worse.”

“But the guys beating on you were white,” Frank observed.

The fire crackled as they considered this.

“It’s getting kind of dangerous out here,” Frank said.

“It always was, Nosebleed.”

“Just got to keep out of the way,” the woman murmured as she began needling again, bringing the work up close to her eyes.

“How you doing?” Frank asked her as the others returned to their riffs and arias.

“Day hundred and forty-two,” she said with a decisive nod.

“Congratulations, that’s great. Are you keeping warm?”

“Hell no.” She guffawed. “How would I do that?”

“Did you get one of my tarps?”

“No, what’s that?”

“I’ll bring them out again. Just a tarp, like a tent fly, you know.”

“Oh.” She was dismissive; possibly she had a place to sleep. “How’d you do up at the hospital?”

“What? Oh fine, fine.”

She nodded. “They’ve got a good ER.”

“Did you—I mean, I don’t remember going there.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Frank was. He could recall the blow, the moments immediately afterward. It hadn’t occurred to him that the next thing he recalled after that was sitting in the ER waiting room, bleeding into paper towels, waiting to be seen. “How’d I get up there?”

“We walked you up. You were okay, just bleeding a lot.”

“I don’t remember that part.”

“Concussion, I’m sure. You got hammered.”

“Did you see what hit me?”

“No, I was tucked down in a lay-by during the fight. Zeno and Andy found you afterward and we took you on up. You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“That’s concussion for you.”

One day at NSF he worked on the photovoltaic cell trials. Department of Energy was now squawking that this was their bailiwick. Then his alarm went off and he went down and sat in his van.

He couldn’t figure out what to do next.

He could taste blood at the back of his throat.

What did that mean? Was something not healing right, some ruptured blood vessel still leaking? Was there pressure on his brain?

Blood was leaking, that was for sure. But of course there must still be swelling inside; he still had a fat lip, after all, and why should swelling inside go away any faster? His black eyes were still visible, though they were turning purple and brown. Who knew? And what now?

He could go to the doctor’s. He could visit the Quiblers, or the Khembalis. He could go to his tree house. He could go back up to work. He could go out to dinner. He could sleep right there in the NSF basement, in the back of his van.

The sense of indecision hadn’t been like this for a while. He was pretty sure of that. Recalling the past week, it seemed to him it had been getting better. Now worse. The stab of elevated heart rate galvanized him again. Maybe this was what they meant by the word terror.

He felt chilled. And in fact it was freezing in his van. Should he put on his down jacket, or—but stop. He grabbed the down jacket and wrestled his way into it, muttering “Do the obvious things, Vanderwal, just do the first fucking tiling that pops into your head. Worry about it later. Leap before you look.”

Indecision. Before his accident he had been much more decisive. Wait, was that right? No. That could not be quite true. Maybe it was before he came to Washington that he had been sure of himself. But had he been? Had he ever been?

For a second he wasn’t sure of anything. He thought back over the years, reviewing his actions, and wondered suddenly if he had ever been quite sane. He had made any number of bad decisions, especially in the past few years, but also long before that. All his life, but getting worse, as in a progressive disease. Why would he have risked Marta’s part of their equity without asking her? Why would he ever have gotten involved with Marta in the first place? How could he have thought it was okay to sabotage Pierzinski’s grant proposal? What had he been thinking, how had he justified it?

He hadn’t. He hadn’t thought about it; one might even say that he had managed to avoid thinking about it. It was a kind of mental skill, a negative capability. Agile in avoiding the basic questions. He had considered himself a rational, and, yes, a good person, and ignored all signs to the contrary. He had made up internal excuses, apparently. All at the unconscious level; in a world of internal divisions. A parcellated mind indeed. But brain functions were parcellated, and often unconscious. Then they got correlated at higher levels—that was consciousness, that was choice. Maybe that higher system could be damaged even when most of the parts were okay.

He twisted the rearview mirror around, stared at himself in it. For a while there in his youth he would stare into his eyes in a mirror and feel that he was meeting some Other. After returning from a climb where a falling rock had missed him by a foot—those kinds of moments.

But after Marta left he had stopped looking at himself in the mirror.

Now he saw a frightened person. Well, he had seen that before. It was not so very unfamiliar. He had never been so sure of himself when he was young. When had certainty arrived? Was it not a kind of hardening of the imagination, a dulling? Had he fallen asleep as the years passed?

Nothing was clear. A worried stranger looked at him, the kind of face you saw glancing up at the clock in a train station. What had he been feeling these last several months before his accident? Hadn’t he been better in that time? Had he not, from the moment Rudra Cakrin spoke to him, tried to change his life?

Surely he had. He had made decisions. He had wanted his tree house. And he had wanted Caroline. These sprang to mind. He had his desires. They might not be entirely conventional, but they were strong.

Maybe it was a little convoluted to be relieved by the notion that having been a fuck-up all his life, there did not have to be a theory of brain trauma to explain his current problems. To think that he was uninjured and merely congenitally deformed, so that was okay. Maybe it would be better to be injured.

He fell asleep at the wheel, thinking I’ll go back to the tree house. Or out to San Diego. Or out to Great Falls. Or call the Khembalis…

The next morning he did not have to decide what to do, as the conference room next to Diane’s office filled with European insurance executives, come to discuss the situation. They politely ignored Frank’s face as Diane made the introductions. They were all people from the four biggest re-insurance companies, Munich Re, Swiss Re, GE Insurance Solutions, and General Re. Two CEOs were there, also Chief Risk Officers, Heads for Sustainability Management, and some men who were “nat cat” guys, as they called it, scientists expert in natural catastrophes, and the mathematical modeling used to develop scenarios and assign risk values.

“We four handle well over half of the total premium volume in re-insurance,” the Swiss Re CEO told Diane and the rest. “Ours is a specialized function, and so we are going to need help. Already we are stretched to the limit, and this winter is going very badly in Europe, as you know. And here too of course. The destruction is really severe. Food shortages will come very quickly if winters become like this regularly. We are having to raise premiums immediately, just to make this first round of payouts. Re-insurance is just one part of a distributed load, but in a situation like this, essentially unprecedented, re-insurance is caught at the end of the stick. This may be the last payout that re-insurance will be able to afford to make. After that the system will be overwhelmed, and then there will have to be a bailout by governments.”

So naturally they were interested in mitigation possibilities; and they had heard at the UN that the most advanced work in the U.S. was being done here at NSF. Diane agreed that this was so, and told them about the North Atlantic project they were evaluating. It turned out they had been discussing the same idea among themselves; all over Europe people hoped it might be possible to “restart the Gulf Stream,” because otherwise European food self-sufficiency was in danger.

The GenRe nat cat expert suggested that surfactants might be spread on the ocean surface to increase evaporation, which would thereby increase the salinity on the surface.

“Take away water instead of just adding salt,” Diane said, looking over at Frank. “That’s good. We’ve been coming up with some pretty high values for the amount of salt likely to be needed.”

They punched up the PowerPoint slides and ran through the isopycnal tables, each curve on the graph suggestive of the slide of cold salty water, down the isopycnal surface to the sea floor.

The cold winter they were now experiencing might also help this plan to restart the circulation, the nat cat expert pointed out. The Arctic sea ice might bulk up to a thickness that wouldn’t break up and drift south when spring came. Surface temperatures would then drop in the fall as they always did, and if they had gotten a fleet loaded with salt, and into position … clouds might also be seeded to the west, to keep precipitation out of the region as much as possible…

Everyone seemed to agree they were onto something. Diane explained that the UN was aware of the plan, and approved it in principle; the remaining problems were likely to be financial and logistical, and perhaps political within the United States.

But maybe the United States was not a make-or-break participant, the Europeans seemed to be suggesting. Neither Diane nor Frank had ever entertained that notion before, but as the Europeans talked about finances, it became an implication too clear to miss, and Frank and Diane exchanged the blank glance that had replaced raised eyebrows between them to express discreet surprise. “We insure each other,” one of them said. “We keep a kind of emergency fund available.”

“This is not actually very expensive, compared to some projects we have been contemplating.”

Wow, Frank said to Diane with another blank look.

He was reading in his sleeping bag when his cell phone rang and he snatched it up.

“Frank, it’s Caroline.”

“Oh good.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m all right. I broke my nose, it’s all stuffed up.”

“Oh no, what happened?”

“I’ll tell you about it when we meet.”

“Okay good. Can you meet?”

“Of course. I have two black eyes.”

“That’s okay. Listen, can we meet at your place in Rock Creek Park?”

He swallowed. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Do they—is it known where it is?”

“Yes. But I think I can help with that.”

“Oh well. Sure. I wanted to show it to you anyway.”

“Tell me where to meet you.”

He descended and crossed the park. His heart was beating hard, his lip throbbing. Everything seemed transparent at the edges, the branches tossing and crashing in slow motion. What a slow pace time had when you paid attention to it. At the corner of Broad Branch and Grant he stood in a shadow, listening to the city and the roar of the wind, watching the luminous cloud pour south overhead. He shivered convulsively, started to hop and dance in place to regenerate some heat.

She turned the corner and he stepped out into the light of a streetlamp. She saw him and quickly crossed the street, banged into him with a hug, started to kiss him but drew back. “Oh my God sorry! Your poor face.”

“It doesn’t feel that bad.”

“Let’s go to your place,” she said.

“Sure.” He turned and led her into the park. Under the trees he took her by the hand. He followed the cross trail; even if she couldn’t see it, the footing would be better.

“Wow, you’re really in here.”

“Yes. So now your surveillance knows I’m here? How did that happen?”

She tugged at his hand. “You know your stuff is chipped, right?”

“No, what’s that?”

“Microchips.”

He stopped, and she stood beside him, squeezing his hand, holding his arm with her other hand. This was how the gibbons often touched.

“You know how everything now is sold with an electronic chip in it? They’re really small, but they bounce a microwave back to a reader, with their ID and location. Businesses use them for inventory. All kinds of stuff.”

“How do they know what stuff is mine?”

“Because you bought most of it with credit cards. It’s easy.” She sounded almost exasperated; she wanted him up to speed on this stuff.

“So they always know where I am?”

“If you’re within the range of a source beam. Which you are most places in D.C.”

“Shit.”

She squeezed his arm. “But not out here.”

Frank started walking again. For a second he did not remember where they were, and he had to stop and think about it before he could go on.

“No one will be able to track us up in my tree?”

“No. The usual chips don’t have much range. Someone would have to be out here with a scanner nearby.”

“Is my stock still rising?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“Not sure. Whatever you’re up to at NSF, I guess.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Maybe it was meeting you that did it.”

“Ha ha.” He could tell by the drag from her hand that she wasn’t amused by this.

“But we’ll be okay now,” he repeated.

“Yes. Well, in terms of being tracked tonight. But if someone came out here it might be different. I brought a reader wand with me, and I think we can clean you out. Maybe even move all the chips somewhere else, so it will look like you’ve moved. I don’t know. I’ve never dechipped anyone before.”

Frank thought about this as they crossed Ross and made the final drop to the edge of the gorge. Under his tree he took out his remote and called down Miss Piggy. He looked at the remote.

“I bought this with a credit card,” he said.

“Radio Shack?”

“Jesus.”

She laughed. “I just guessed that. But it’s in your records, I’m sure.”

“Shit.”

Miss Piggy hummed down out of the night, looking like the ladder you climbed to get into the flying saucer hovering overhead. Frank showed her where to grab, where to step. “You go first and I’ll hold it steady. That’ll be better.”

Up she went, quick and lithe, soon a black mass in the stars overhead, like a burl on the trunk. It took her a while at the top, and he shook his head, thinking she must think he was nuts. When she was off he climbed swiftly, pulled through the entry hole. “Sorry, the last part can be the trickiest.”

“No problem. This is so cool!”

“Ah. Thanks.” He sat down beside her. “I’m glad you like it.”

“I love it. We used to have a tree house in our backyard.”

“Really! Where was this?”

“Outside Boston. My dad built it in a big old tree, I don’t know what kind it was, but it was wider than it was tall. We had several platforms, and a big staircase running down to the ground.”

“Nice.”

“This is smaller,” she noted, and pulled closer to him. They sat side by side, cold hands entwined on top of her legs. The wind was tossing the tree gently north and south. “It’s like a nest.”

“Yes. We can get out of the wind if we need to,” he said, indicating the tent behind them.

“I like it out here, if it doesn’t get too cold.”

“Let’s use it as a wind-block, then.”

They shifted into the lee of the tent, bumping against each other as the tree swayed.

“It’s like being on a train.”

“Or a ship.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

They huddled together. Frank felt too strange to kiss; he was distracted, and it was hard to get used to the presence of someone else in his tree house. “Um—do you think you could show me what you mean about the chips?”

She dug in her jacket pocket, took out a short metal wand, like the devices used by airport security. “Do you have some light?”

“Sure,” he said, and clicked on the Coleman lamp. The lit circle on the plywood floor gleamed under them, ruining their night vision. The wind hooted and moaned.

She had him bring his belongings to her one by one. Sometimes she would get a beep as she passed the wand over them, and these she put to one side. Clock, lightweight sleeping bag, some of the clothes, even the little stove.

“Damn,” he said.

“Yeah. That’s the way it is. You’re not as bad as some. A lot of your gear must be pretty old.”

“It definitely is.”

“That’s the way to do it. If you want to get out from under surveillance, you have to go back in time.”

“You mean only use old stuff?”

“That’s right. But really you don’t want to get yourself entirely clear, that would trigger interest you don’t want. But there are levels and levels. You could make it so that nothing on you tells where you are at any given moment. That might not even be noticed. The program would just use the stuff you do have, like your phone. It would assume you are where your phone is.”

“I see. Damn.”

“I know.” She had finished with his things. Now she leaned away from him, sweeping the foot of the platform methodically, right to left, coming back to them by a foot or so per sweep, then past them and to the wide part at his head, and around the corner. Then inside the tent. It was a small platform, but she was being thorough. “I don’t think it’s known that you’re up in a tree. Before you told me, I thought you were just camped out in the woods, on the ground. I wonder if anyone’s come out to ground-check you.”

She waved the wand over him, and it beeped.

“Uh oh,” she said.

She moved him. It wasn’t where he was sitting. It was him.

“Maybe my clothes?”

She grinned. “We’ll have to check. Get into the tent.”

They brought the Coleman lamp inside with them, zipped down the tent door. Frank turned on his little battery heater, and they watched its element turn orange and begin radiating. The wind was still noisy, and they could feel the tree swaying, but the warm air cocooned them.

She helped him unbutton his shirt, pull it off. The air was still cold. “Your poor face.” She ran the wand over him. It beeped when she held it over the middle of his back.

“Interesting. That’s the same spot it was on me.”

“You were chipped too?”

“That’s right.”

“By who?”

She didn’t answer. “Here, turn your back to the lamp. Have you got an extra flashlight? Yes? Good. Here, let me.” She inspected him. He could feel her fingers on his back, poking and then squeezing. “Ah ha. There it is.”

“You sure it isn’t just a blackhead?”

“Actually it looks more like a tick, you know how when you pull off a tick and part of it breaks in you?”

“Yuck. You’re grooming me.”

“That’s right. Then it’ll be your turn to groom me.” She kissed the nape of his neck. “Hold steady now. I brought some twee2ers.”

“How did you get yours out?”

“I had a hell of a time. I had to use a barbeque tong. Like a back scratcher. I watched in the mirror and gouged it out.”

“Back stabber.”

“Yes. I stabbed myself in the back, but I’ll never do it to you. Except for now.”

“Don’t make me laugh or I’ll bleed on you.”

“You’re going to bleed anyway.” She poked gently at his back.

“How the hell did they get it in me?”

“Don’t know. When you hurt your nose did you go to a hospital?”

“Yes. I was there for a few hours.”

“Maybe that was when. Okay, here it is. Hold steady.”

Then a quick cut. Frank held himself immobile. Now she was wiping off his back with her fingers, and kissing his spine at the base of his neck. She ripped open a little square Band-Aid and applied it to the spot.

“You thought of everything,” he said.

“I hope so.”

“What about you?”

“What do you mean?”

He picked up the wand.

“Oh that. I think I’m okay.”

But he ran it over her anyway, and it beeped over her back.

Her mouth tightened to a hard line. “Shit.”

“It wasn’t there before?”

“No.” She ripped off her jacket, took the wand and ran it over it. No beep. She pulled her shirt off over her head; shocking lovely curve of freckled white skin, spine deep in a furrow of muscles, ribs, shoulder blades, the curve of her right breast in its bra cup as she faced away from him. He ran the wand over her back, listened for the beep, watched for the green lights on its black face. Like finding the stud in a wall; but nothing. He ran it over her crumpled shirt and it beeped. “Ah ha.”

“Okay,” she said, spreading the shirt out and inspecting it. “That’s good. Here. It’ll just be a few millimeters long.” She ran the wand closely over the shirt, inspected the part under the beeping. “In a seam … yep. Here it is.” She cut with a pair of keychain scissors, held up a tiny black cylinder, like a tiny bike pump valve stopper.

“Maybe there’s another one in your bra,” Frank suggested, and she laughed and leaned forward to kiss him; and then they were hugging hard, kissing lightly, she only brushing her lips against his, murmuring, “Oh, oh, it must hurt—watch out, I’m going to hurt you,” and him replying, “It’s all right, it’s all right, kiss me.”

They got off the rest of their clothes and onto his groundpad, under his unzipped sleeping bags. All warm and cozy and yet still bobbing on the wind. Finally completing the dive that they had launched in their stuck elevator, so many months before; they finally fell in and were both seized up in it together. This was Frank’s overriding impression, to the extent he had any thoughts at all; the togetherness of it. She kissed him gingerly, squeezed him hard, as sure with her caresses as she had been with her little surgery. Frank began to bleed again down the back of his throat, he tasted blood and was afraid she could too.

“I’m going to bleed on you I’m afraid.”

“Here—let’s turn over.”

She straightened her left leg under his right, and they rolled to that side together as if they had done it a thousand times before; then crabbed back onto the mattress pad. Frank swallowed blood, held her as she moved on him. Off they went again.

Afterward she lay beside him, her head on his chest. He could feel that she could hear his heartbeat. He ran his fingers through the tight curls of her hair. “Wow.”

“I know.”

“I needed that.”

“Me too.” She shifted her head to look at him. “How long has it been for you?”

Frank calculated. Marta, the last time … quite some time before she moved out. Some of those last times had been very strange: sex as hatred, sex as despair. Usually he managed not to know that a nearly eidetic memory of those encounters had been seared into him, but now he glimpsed them, quickly shoved them away again in his mind. “About a year and a half?”

“It’s been four years for me.”

“What?”

“That’s right.” She made a face. “I told you. We don’t get along.”

“But…”

“I know. That’s just the way it is. He has other interests.”

“Someone else, you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“But that chip in your shirt?”

“That was him.”

“So—he keeps tabs on you?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

She shrugged. “Just to do it. I don’t know really. He started working with another agency, and it seems to have gotten worse since then. He’s always been kind of obsessive. It’s a control thing.”

“So this new job is with another security agency?”

“Oh yes. I think it’s linked to Homeland Security, maybe just a black-black inside it.”

“So, these chips. Will he know you’ve been here?”

“No, he would have to be following me. The chips ping back a radio signal with their information and location, but the range isn’t very big. It’s getting bigger though, and they’ve been installing a network of transmitters that will give comprehensive coverage in the capital area. But it hasn’t been activated yet, as far as I know. I think you still need to be tracking to get a bounce from a chip. Not that he wouldn’t do that too. But he’s out of town.”

Frank didn’t know what to say.

Long silence. They let it go. There they were, after all, just the two of them. Rocking back and forth. She lay her head on his chest. Back and forth, back and forth.

“This feels so good. It’s like being in a cradle.”

“Yes,” Frank said. “You can tell which direction the wind is coming from. See, it’s coming from the north, from behind our head. When it swings toward our feet, there’s a little pause at the end, while the wind holds it out there. Then it springs back with an extra little push, like it’s been released. Whereas behind our heads we’re going into the wind, so it slows sooner and makes the turnaround quicker, with no extra acceleration from the release. See, feel that?”

“No.” She giggled.

“Feel it again. Downwind, upwind, downwind, upwind. They’re different.”

“Hmm. So they are. Like a little hitch.”

“Yes.”

“It’s like clocks going tick tock. Supposedly there’s hardly any difference between the two sounds.”

“True.” Frank felt a deep breath fill him, lifting her head. “I’m glad you don’t think I’m crazy.”

“Me? I’m in no position to think anyone else is crazy. I am fully out there myself.”

“Maybe we all are now.”

“Maybe so.”

They lay there, swaying back and forth. Please time stop now. The wind strummed the forest; they could hear individual gusts sweep across the watershed. Creaking branches, the occasional snap and crash, all within a huge airy whoosh, keening and hooting, filling everything with its continuo.

They talked quietly about tree houses. She told him all about the one in her backyard, her nights out, her tea parties, her cats, a neighborhood raccoon, a possum. “I thought it was a big rat. It scared me to death.”

Frank told her about his love for the Swiss Family tree house at Disneyland. “I had a plan to hide when the park closed. Tom Sawyer Island was divided by a fence, with a maintenance area north of the public part. I was sure I could swing around the fence and hide, but then I would be stuck on the island. I decided in the summer that would be okay, I could swim over to Frontierland and sneak through New Orleans to the tree. Clothes on my head, towel, the whole bit. I practiced swimming without my arms.”

She laughed. “Why didn’t you do it?”

“I couldn’t think of anything to tell my parents. I didn’t want them to worry.”

“Good boy.”

“Well, I would have gotten in such trouble.”

“True.”

Later she said, “Do you think we could open the tent and look at the stars? Would we get blasted by wind?”

“Somewhat. We can move halfway out and zip down the tent door. I do that a lot.”

“Okay let’s try it.”

He zipped open the tent. The cold poured in on them, and they bundled into the sleeping bag. Frank zipped it up until only their faces emerged from the hood of the bag. Set properly on the groundpad they started to warm up against each other. They kissed as much as Frank’s face could handle, which was not much. When they started to make love they fell into it more languorously. They moved with the sway of the tree in the wind, a slow back and forth, like being on a train or truly huge waterbed. But this was too perfect and they started to laugh, they had to break rhythm with the tree and they did.

Afterward he said, “What should I do about these chips?”

“I’ll leave you this wand. You can get completely clear, and they might not have this spot GPSed. Could you move to another tree, with stuff you’re sure is clean?”

“I guess so. It’s all pretty modular, sure.” Frank realized he had grown fond of his tree, even though there were ten thousand others just like it all around him.

“That way, if you kept it a clean site, they wouldn’t know where you were. When you were away from your van, anyway.”

“I’d have to leave a lot of stuff in the van.”

“They would think you were living in it. You’d have to wand yourself when you came up here, and see if you’d picked anything up. If you wanted to be serious about it, you’d get rid of the van and cell phone, and only use public stuff, and buy everything with cash. We call it devolving.”

Frank laughed. “I’ve been trying to do that anyway.”

“I can see that. But you’d have to do it in this other area.”

He nodded. He put his face into the hair on the top of her head. Tight curls, a kind of lemon and cypress shampoo; he felt her body on his, and another jolt of desire ran through him. She was helping him. She was strong, bold, interested. She liked him, she wanted him. After four years she would probably want anybody, but now it was him.

“What about you?” he said.

She shrugged.

“So does your, does he know that you know he’s spying on you?”

“He must.” Her grimace as underlit by Frank’s floor lamp gave her the look of one of the Khembali demon masks: fear, despair, anger. Seeing it Frank felt a wave of deep dislike for her husband pour through him. He wanted to get rid of him. Remove him like a chip. Protect her, make her happy—

“—but we don’t talk about it,” she was saying.

“That sounds bad.”

“It is bad. I need to get out of there. But there are some complications having to do with his new job. Some things I need to do first,” She fell silent, and her body, though still on top of his, was not melted into him as before. This was another new sensation, her otherness, naked and on top of him. He shivered and pulled the down bag back over their heads.

“So you got your pay-phone numbers.”

“Yes.” He had remembered despite the injury.

“And when will we talk?”

“Nine p.m. every Friday?”

“Sure. And if we have to miss for some reason, the next week for sure, and if we miss again, I’ll call your cell phone.”

“Okay. Good.”

Her warmth coursed into him. Up in the tree they hugged each other. This moment of the storm.

“Oh good,” he said.

Leap before you look.

Now winter was here in earnest. A series of brutal storms fell on the city, like the ones that had struck London only drier, all of them windy and cold, not very much snow, but that only made them seem colder. Kenzo said there hadn’t been a winter like this since the Younger Dryas; it was worse than the Little Ice Age of the fourteenth century, a true North Atlantic stall event. Average temperatures in eastern North America and western Europe down by a full thirty degrees Fahrenheit.

Frank spent as much time as he could out in these storms. He loved being in them. He loved the way he felt after the night with Caroline. The walking-on-air sensation returned, obviously a specific body awareness in response to certain emotional states, giving birth to the cliché. Lightness of being.

Then also the intense winter was like moving into ever higher altitudes, or latitudes. He was in the wilderness and he was in love, and the combination was a kind of ecstatic state, a new realm of joy—

“the joy which will not let me sit in my chair, which brings me bolt upright to my feet, and sends me striding around my room, like a tiger in his cage—and I cannot have composure and concentration enough even to set down in English words the thought which thrills me, what if I never write a book or a line?—for a moment, the eyes of my eyes were opened.”

Emerson for the day indeed. A man who knew how joy could loft you. No wonder they named schools after him! You could learn a lot just by reading him alone.

He snowshoed the park regularly, but also began to range more broadly in the city, taking long walks on each side of the park. This was where the homeless guys were finding refuge, and where the fregans and ferals made their homes. Frank decided that whenever he did not know what to do, he was to go out and visit as many of the bros and the other homeless of Northwest as he could, and make sure their gear kit was up to the ferocity of the elements. Even if he found total strangers huddled on the Metro vents and in the other little heat sinks of the city, he talked to them too; and if they were at all responsive he got them under another layer of nylon, at the very least. Most had some down or wool on them, but a surprising number were still shivering under cotton, cardboard, plastic, foam rubber, newspaper. Frank could only shake his head. Don’t wear cotton! he would insist to perfect strangers. Some of them even recognized him as Johnny Appletent.

He started visiting thrift stores and sporting goods stores too, buying overlooked or sale items, particularly synthetic clothes, and cheap but effective down bags. Once he bought a whole rack of capilene long underwear and matching long-sleeved shirts. These were really nice, similar to one of the inner layers he wore himself, and the next time he was out in the park and saw some of the bros were back in Sleepy Hollow, their shelters more knockabout than ever, he threw a top-bottom pair knotted together in to each one of them. “Here, wear this against your skin. Nothing but this stuff against your skin. No cotton! Throw all that cotton crap away. You’re going to freeze in that cotton shit.”

“It’s fucking cold.”

“Yeah it’s cold. Get this gear on and stay out of the wind when it blows.”

“No shit.”

Andy said, “It’s not the cold, it’s the wind.” The wee-und.

“Yeah yeah yeah. That’s right.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

Frank snorted. “That’s for sure.”

It was the new truism, and already Frank was sick of it. Just as in summer people said, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” until you wanted to scream, in the winter they said, “It’s not the cold, it’s the wind.” So tedious to hear over and over! But Andy’s default mode was repetition of the obvious, so this new mantra was unavoidable.

And certainly it was true. On windless nights Frank snowshoed through the forest completely removed from the cold; his exertion warmed him, and his heat was trapped in his layers of clothing, under jacket and windpants. The only problem was not to break a sweat. He might as well have been in a spacesuit.

But in a wind everything changed. How big the world became, yes, but how cold too! His outer layer was as windproofed as you could get, but the wind still rattled through it and sucked at every move he made. On the very worst nights, if he wanted to walk into the wind he had to turn his back to it and crab backwards to keep his face from frostbite. During the days he had taken to wearing sunglasses with a nosepiece, because with his nose numb all the time he couldn’t be sure if it was getting frostbitten or not. More than once it had been white in the mirror when he got back in his van. The nosepiece helped with that, as well as giving him a medieval look, like a burgher out of Brueghel. Icicles of snot would hang from the tip of it at the end of a walk, but his nose would stay warm.

Fine for his poor nose, but then he discovered there were other protrusions that also needed extra protection; he finished one long tramp on a windy Saturday afternoon, stopped in the forest to pee, and discovered to his dismay that his penis was as numb as his nose! Numb with cold, meaning, oh my … yes; it was thawing out in his hand, as painful a needling effect as he had ever felt, a burning agony lasting some ten minutes. He cried and his nose ran and it all froze on his face. An unusual demonstration of the density of nerve endings in that area, as in that old illustration of the human body in which the parts were sized in proportion to how many nerves they had, making a nightmare figure with giant mouth, hands, and genitalia.

The lunch runners already knew all about this problem. Penile frostbite was a serious concern, and extra precautions simply had to be taken; at the least, a sock or glove jammed into one’s shorts, but also windproof nylon shorts, longer jackets, all that kind of thing.

“What you need is a rabbit fur jock strap, the fur side in of course. You could make a fortune selling those.”

So, Frank never again forgot to pay attention to this matter, and not just for himself. A couple weeks later, when he clattered into Sleepy Hollow:

“Hey, Nosebleed.”

“Hello gentlemen. How are your penises?”

“Yarrrr!” Cackles, laughter: “Now the truth comes out! Now we know what he’s here for!”

“You wish. Are you managing to stay unfrostbitten?”

“NO.”

Various grumbles and moans.

“Look, there’s a shelter open over by UDC, it’s the closed high school’s gym and some classrooms too, it’s pretty nice.”

“We know. Fuck you.”

“Mr. Nose. Mr. Nosey Noser.”

“Mr. Nosey Nose That Knows It All.”

“Yeah well it beats freezing to death.”

“Yarrr, fuck off. We have our ways.”

“It is our fate to stay out here, but we will survive.”

“I hope so.”

Friday came and he went out to cat at a Mexican restaurant on Wisconsin near the Metro. He could tell already this would become his Friday night routine. It was an unpretentious little place where Frank could sit at the bar reading his laptop. Go to Emersonfortheday.com, search “fate”:

So true. But that turned out to be from the essay “Fate,” not about fate per se. Try again, word search in texts:

“The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of these.”

Oh my yes. So well put. What a perceptive and eloquent worshipper of nature old Waldo was. And why not. New England had heroic weather, which often cast its prosaic forest right up to the heights of the Himalayas or the shores of the Arctic.

But it was almost nine. He hopped up and paid his bill, using cash, which he did as often as he could now.

The pay phone he had chosen was in the Bethesda Metro complex itself, down by the bus stop. There were several phones in a row, and he went to the one on the end and pulled out a phone card, ran it through the slot, dialed her number.

No answer. He let it ring a long time, then hung up.

He stood by the phone, thinking things over. Was this bad? She had said it might not work every week. He had no idea what her daily routine was. How did that work, with a husband you hadn’t slept with for four years?

When the phone rang he jumped a foot and snatched it up. “Hello?”

“Hi Frank it’s Caroline. Did you call before?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, this was as early as I could make it. I was hoping you’d still be there.”

“Sure. We should have a kind of window anyway.”

“True.”

“So … how’s it going?”

“Oh, crazy. All over the place.”

“Everything’s okay?”

“Yes.”

Gingerly they re-established the intimacy they had inhabited the week before. It was hard over the phone, but that voice in his ear brought back a lot of it, and he took chances: How are things going at home? I thought of you… Then she was telling him about her relationship, a bit, and the link between them was there again, that sense of closeness she could establish with a look or a touch, or, now, with her voice, clear and low. The distance between her and her husband had existed for years, she said; maybe since the beginning. They had met at work, he was older, he had been one of her bosses, now in a different agency, “blacker than black.” They had not had any huge fights, ever, but for some years now he had not been home much, or showed any interest in her sexually (“Incredible,” Frank said). But before they had met he had worked for a while in Afghanistan, so who knew where he was at.

That gave him a chill. “How did you two ever hook up?” he couldn’t help saying.

“I don’t know. My sister says I like to fix messed-up guys not that I mean you!” she added in a rush.

Frank only laughed. “That’s all right. Maybe your sister was right. I am certainly messed up, but you are fixing me.”

“And you me, believe me.”

But then, she went on, she had discovered by accident that he had chipped her, why she could not be sure; and a cold war, silent and strange, had gone on since then.

Frank shivered at the thought of this. They talked about other things, then. Their workouts, the weather: “I thought about you the other night when it got windy.”

“Me you too.”

Their windy night, oh my—

“I want to see you again,” she said.

“When can we?”

“I don’t know. I’ll look for a chance. There’s some stuff happening I may have to deal with. Maybe I’ll have something set up by next week.”

“Okay, next week then. Which one of us should call, by the way?”

“I’ll call you. I’ll start with this same number.”

“Okay good.”

He walked back to his van, passing first their elevator box on Wisconsin Avenue, then the little park where they had met the first two times. His Caroline places. This would be a new addition to his set of habits, he could tell, and all the rest would be transformed by it. He had gone feral, he had gone optimodal, he had become the Alpine man; and on Friday evenings he would get to talk to his Caroline on the phone, and those talks would lift and carry everything else, including the next time they met in person.

But faster than Frank could follow, winter went from the sublime to the ridiculous, and then to the catastrophic. He was enjoying it right up to the moment it started killing people.

That night, for instance, it was cold but not terribly so; there wasn’t much wind, and its bite was invigorating. It made so much difference how you were experiencing it—not just what you wore, but how you felt about it. If you thought of it as an Emersonian transcendental expedition, ascending further in psychic altitude or latitude the colder it got, then it was just now getting really interesting—they were up to like the Canadian Arctic or the High Sierra, and that was beautiful. A destination devoutly to be wished.

But temperatures the following week plummeted from that already low point, an astonishing development no matter what they had been reading in the newspapers about other places. And that drop took them out to the equivalent of Antarctica or the Himalayas, both very dangerous places to be.

The first big drop was like a cold snap in a cold front, barreling in from Edmonton. It arrived at midnight, and by two a.m. he could not get warm even in his sleeping bag—a rare experience for him, and frightening as such. He fired up the space heater and cooked the air in the tent for a while, and that helped. But the heat sucked out of the tent the moment he killed the heater, and after a couple of burns he decided he had to go for a walk, maybe even a drive, to soak in some of the van’s warmth.

Climbing down Miss Piggy was a nasty surprise. He started to swing in the wind, and then his hands got too cold to hold on to the rungs properly, so that he had to hook his elbows over and hang on for dear life, waiting for the wind to calm; but it didn’t calm. He had to continue one rung at a time, setting his feet as securely as possible and then reaching down for another elbow hook. One rung at a time.

Finally he dropped onto the snow. He pushed the remote, but the ladder did not swing up into the night. Battery too cold.

Really very cold. You could only survive exposure in this kind of cold with the appropriate gear. Even ensconced in his spacesuit, Frank was struggling to stay warm. This was a temperature equivalent to being in the death zones of Everest or the Antarctic plateau.

And yet people were still out there in cotton. Out there in blue jeans and black leather jackets, for God’s sake. Newspaper insulation for the most hapless. And the animals, all but the polar ones—they would be dying if they weren’t in one of the shelters. The wind cut him in a way he had felt only a few times before, most of those in the Yukon’s Cirque of the Unclimbables, on multiday wall climbs. For it to happen in this semitropical city was bizarre, and an immediate emergency. And indeed it sounded like people were calling 911. He could hear sirens from every direction.

He could take care of himself, of course. Ceaseless motion was the key. So he hiked hard; but even so he got cold. He had forgotten what a furious assault cold made on you, he had to bury his face in the windward side of his hood, and had no idea how his nose was faring. For a while he even got lost, and worried that he had turned somehow and was headed south on the ridge trail. Narrow as it was, the park that night was too wide to cross.

He headed uphill, hoping it was west but knowing he would emerge eventually if he kept going up. He kicked right up the sides of snow drifts, noticing again what a huge difference his snowshoes made. It would have been horrible to post up a slope like that in deep snow. And yet he was one of the few people using snowshoes in the city. Only the FOG people used them, as far as he had seen. Surely the ferals must be into it, if they weren’t skiing.

He came out on Broad Branch Road, almost exactly where he had hoped to be. God bless the unconscious mind.

He was very happy to hear his van start when he turned the key. After revving the engine for a while, he drove off with the heater on high. The van rocked on the gusts. The few other vehicles on the streets were weaving like drunks. SUVs finally looked at home, as if they had all moved to Fairbanks.

After driving around for a while he warmed up. The day arrived on a broad red sky. He snowshoed back out into the park, went first to 21 to check on the bros.

“Hey, Noseman! You should have a fucking barrel of brandy under your chin.”

“I’m amazed you guys are alive. How did you do it?”

“The fire.” Zeno gestured at it, pale in its giant mound of ashes. “We sat right next to it all night long.”

“We kept it real big, we had to keep running out for more branches, shit. It was so fucking cold. I stood like six inches from this mother bonfire and even so my backside was freezing. One side of me was frying and the other was freezing.”

“It was cold all right. Do you have enough firewood, or what are you burning?”

“We have all the flood wood.”

“Isn’t it green still?”

“Fuck yeah, but we’ve got a can of gas, and Cutter keeps siphoning cars to fill it up. Car gas burns like a motherfucker, it explodes in that fire, you’ve got to be really careful.”

“Okay, well don’t burn yourself up. There’s that shelter up at UDC—”

“Yeah yeah gowan! Gowan witcha! Go help some of them poor fools out there who probably need it.”

This was a valid point, and so Frank snowshoed off. Out of the park, into the paralyzed city.

In Starbucks they said it had been fifty below zero Fahrenheit at dawn. Almost a hundred degrees below the average daytime temperature for the day—now that was climate change. Sirens were still howling all over the city.

Frank called Diane. She was already at work, of course, but only because she had spent the night there. Forget about coming in, she told him. “No one should even try. I mean, can you believe this?”

“I believe it,” said Frank.

FEMA had already declared it a disaster area, Diane said. Federal employees were now being told to stay home, along with everyone else but emergency personnel. Lines were down, and power outages had been reported; all those areas were in crisis mode. Water mains had frozen and burst, there were fires going unfought, and no doubt thousands were in danger of freezing to death in their own homes. Six a.m. and already it was a huge emergency.

“Okay Diane, I’ll stay in touch today and I’ll keep my phone on.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to see how I can help at the zoo, I think. There are still a lot of animals at large.”

“You be careful! It’s dangerous when it’s this cold.”

“Yeah I will. I’ve got polar gear, I’ll be okay.”

“Good. Okay, let’s talk.”

So Frank was free to do what he had wanted to anyway. “Ooooop!”

All the streets in Northwest were empty, or very close to it. No more blue jeans and windbreakers; the only people out and about were dressed as for polar exploration, or at the very least, a day of very cold skiing. These people greeted each other with the cheeriness of people who have survived a rapture and inherited the world. They were mostly men at first, out to see if they could help somehow, out for the hell of it really; and then there were quite a few women out too, more and more as the day wore on, often in bright ski colors. Esprit de corps was high. People waved to each other as they passed, stopped to talk on the street. Everyone agreed that anybody out in this without good gear would quickly go hypothermic, while on the other hand, good gear and constant exertion meant one could thrive. It was a stunning experience of the technological sublime, an evident natural religion. Space was indeed felt as a great thing. And some of the coffee shops were still open, so Frank ducked in them from time to time, like everyone else, for a break from the penetrating chill. Heated caves, there to take shelter in any time it got to be too much—as long as the area still had electricity, of course. The areas without power would be in trouble, perhaps in need of evacuation.

“I’m from Ohio,” one man said to Frank outside a Starbucks. “This is nothing!”

“Well, it’s pretty cold,” Frank said.

“True! But it’s not windy. Thank God for that. Because it’s not the cold, it’s the…”

Having toured Connecticut Avenue, Frank began a comprehensive hunt through Rock Creek Park, walking the Western Ridge Trail and venturing down every side trail. He was relieved to find that the park was basically empty. The deer were tucked into their brakes and hollows; he wondered whether these would be enough, this could be a major die-off. But you never knew. Snow was a tremendous insulator and windguard, and these deer had gone through winters before.

And the truth was, they could use some culling. It was the ferals he was really worried about.

Then he found three people, still huddled together in a wood-and-cardboard shelter, down by site 9. At first he thought they were dead; then they stirred. He called 911 and waited, getting colder and colder as he tried unsuccessfully to rouse them, until some firemen got there. He helped them get the three up to the road and the truck, two on stretchers; the one who had been in the middle had done a bit better.

He went back to look for more. Rock Creek itself was frozen to its bottom, of course. The whole park was quiet, the city beyond it unusually quiet too, except for the ongoing wail of sirens, criss-crossing like tortured coyotes or the gibbons with megaphones.

The firemen had said the power grid might go comprehensively when the demand for juice was so high. The power companies had instituted preemptive brownouts to keep from blowing the system. Fire trucks were some of the only vehicles that would still start reliably, because they were kept in heated garages. Battery heaters were crucial at temps like these, but of course no one had any.

“My van started this morning,” Frank had told them.

“You get one, usually, but don’t be sure it’ll happen again, they’re done for at these temps. It’s fifty below!”

“I know.”

Lucky no wind! they said.

Frank checked the hot boxes left out for the ferals. If there was a loss of power to these the result would be catastrophic. Every box was crowded with a menagerie of miserable animals, like little shipwrecked bits of Noah’s Ark, every single creature subdued and huddled into itself. The gibbons hung from the corners of the roof near the heating elements, their little faces frowning like Laurel and Hardy after a reversal.

Frank called in to Nancy and reported what he saw. Zoo staff were doing what they could to collect any creatures they could, but the holdouts were skittish and determined to stay out; if the 200 folks tried for them now they stood a very good chance of driving them away and killing them. Best to let them take to the shelters, and hope it would be enough.

“Is the power to the heaters on generator standby?”

“No way. Cross your fingers.”

He continued with his survey. The low sun turned everything blinding silver. By now the temperature had risen to about twenty below, which in combination with the midday sunlight made a huge difference in how it felt to walk around. It came back to his body’s memory how major distinctions could be made between cold and super-cold, so that eventually ten below became comfortable, because thirty below was so miserable; and ten above became shirtsleeve weather, while fifty below was always on the edge of sudden death.

The power went out west of Connecticut Avenue, and Frank went over there and helped for a while with a crew going door to door to make sure people were all right, occasionally carrying the hypothermic out to fire trucks and ambulances and off to shelters or hospitals. Eventually his hands got too cold to carry on. He had to retreat into a UDC coffee shop and drink a coffee with the other adventurers sardined into the place. Painful bu22 of his fingers regaining their feeling, though it was nothing to the way his penis had felt. Then the coffee shop had to stop serving, as their pipes had fro2en and their water supplies on hand were all used up. They stayed open just to provide shelter. The damage to pipes alone was sure to cost millions, someone said, and take weeks or months to fix. They might be in for a water crisis as bad as the one after the flood, when for several days potable water and functioning toilets had been very hard to find. People didn’t think about these kinds of things until they happened, and then it was like discovering yet another Achilles’ heel, because it had ruptured.

The sounds of sirens seemed to be converging on them. Frank went out and looked around, saw black smoke rising in a thick plume over the neighborhood between Connecticut and the park, just south of where his van was parked. He hustled over there, slapping his tingling hands together as he walked.

It looked as if squatters might have accidentally set an abandoned house on fire. Already the blaze was out of hand, several houses burning, a whole knot of trees, all roaring in pale flames. The radiant heat beat on Frank’s face. When the fire trucks arrived they found that the water had frozen in the fire hydrants. They had to work on that instead of the fire. A helicopter chattered in and dropped its load of chemicals, to no great effect as far as Frank could tell. It had to be dangerous to fly helicopters in this kind of cold; they did it in Antarctica, but those helos were specially prepped. No doubt the Antarctic guys at NSF were extremely busy right now, helping in any way they could. No lunch run today. Corps of Engineers likewise. It was essential they keep power flowing. If there was any kind of significant power outage throughout the city, many people would freeze.

Talking to some of the firemen around the hydrant, Frank learned that there were already as many as two dozen fires in the metro area. All emergency response people were out: firemen, police, paramedics, the power company repair crews; the National Guard had been called up, yes both of them. Everyone else was being urged to stay home. Nevertheless the number of people walking the streets increased as the day wore on, all of them bundled and ski-masked and walking out in the empty streets. It looked as if bank robbers had pulled off a major revolution.

Another fire started in Georgetown, which then lost power, and it also had frozen water mains. Frank drove down there, as his van kept starting for him, and he served as a taxi for a couple of hours, shuttling people from frigid houses and apartments onto the Georgetown University campus, where generators were keeping most of the buildings warm. George Washington University Hospital was also working on generators, and for a while it was clear that taxiing people was the best thing Frank could do to help; but then the streets began to jam up with traffic, amazingly—it was still twenty below and yet stop-and-go had returned to Foggy Bottom. So he parked in Georgetown again and joined a group of volunteers going door-to-door in the outage area, making sure everyone was out who wanted to be out.

The residential streets of Georgetown were a surprise to Frank. He had never walked around, or even driven in, this part of town, and it was like being transported to some quaint and comfortable old quarter of a northern European town. Colorful, neat, handmade, human scale—the streets were like what Main Street in Disneyland had always hoped to suggest, much more real of course, but still, toylike. Like the village in a snow-filled paperweight. He would have to return and check it out under more normal circumstances.

The sky overhead was unlike that in any paperweight, dark with smoke that streamed in fat bands all across the sky. A huge population lived hidden in the forest around the city, and nearly every single fireplace must have had a blaze in it; and a certain percentage had gone wrong and burned down their houses and added their greater smokes to the chimney fires, so that now the sky was streaked with black, and flakes of ash drifted down, lighter than snowflakes. Frank’s nose kept him from smelling the smoke, but he could taste it as grit on his tongue, a little acrid. He wondered if he would ever be able to smell again.

A fire truck wailed down Wisconsin, and the firemen in it jumped out and ran a pump and hose line down to the Potomac. It took some awkward work with chainsaws to break through the ice covering the river, which was now a big white sheet from bank to bank. A crowd gathered to watch and cheer, their breath frosting over them in a small cloud. Sputter and roar of a big Honda generator powering up, downshift as the pump motor was engaged, a moment of suspense while nothing happened; then the flattened hose bulked like a snake swallowing a mouse, and water shot out of the big nozzle held by two firemen, who quickly secured it to a stand and aimed the white flow at the leading edge of their blaze. The crowd cheered again. Spray flying upward from the jet of water had time to freeze in the air, flocking the nearby rooftops with the kind of snow one saw at ski resorts. A tall black man grinned hugely at Frank: “They froze that fire.”

Late in the day Frank went back down to the Potomac to walk out on the ice. Scores of people had had the same idea. It had happened the same way in London two weeks before, and all over the world people had seen images of the grand festival the Londoners had spontaneously thrown, celebrating the freeze in the Elizabethan style. Now on the Potomac people were mostly standing around or skiing, playing football or soccer ad hoc versions of curling. One or two wore ice skates and glided through the crowd, but most were slipping around in boots or their ordinary shoes. A hotdog-cart man was busy selling out his entire stock. The ice on the river was usually white but here and there was as clear as glass, the moving black water visible below. It was freaky at first to walk on these clear sections, but even big groups and giant leaps into the air did not cause a shudder in the ice, which looked from the occasional hole chopped in it to be about two foot thick, maybe more.

When sunset slanted redly across the Potomac the light struck Frank like another vision out of Brueghel. One of his Flemish winter canal scenes, except most of the Washington, D.C., population was black. Out here on the river you could finally see that in a way that Northwest and Arlington never revealed. It was like Carnavale on ice, the celebrants improvising clothing that was warm enough to keep them out there, which then became costumes too. A giant steel drum band added to the Caribbean flavor. Snowfights and slip-and-slides, break dancing and curling that was more like bowling, touch football, tackle football, it all was happening out there between Virginia and the District, on this sudden new terrain. In the fading light the whole world took on a smoky red cast, the river ice both white and red, and the contrast between the snow and the dark faces finally diminished to the point where Frank could see people properly. It seemed to him to be an extraordinarily beautiful populace, every race and ethnicity on Earth represented—the many black faces vivid and handsome, cheerful to the point of euphoria, laughing as they took in the scene—the white folk flushed as red as the sunset snow, dressed like L.L. Bean or gypsies or Russians or anything they had at hand—all partying together on the frozen Potomac, until with the dark it got too cold to stay out any longer.

The fires burned all night and into the next day, but on the other hand, the temperatures never dropped lower than ten below. Some in the coffee shops next morning thought all the smoke had created a smudge pot effect, the ultimate urban heat-island insulator; but even out in the country the temperatures had not dropped as low as they had gotten the night before. The low had been a freak thing, an all-time record for the city, and even the Post the next morning had a headline like a London tabloid: fifty degrees below.

Though it never got that cold again in the days that followed, it always remained well below zero, keeping the city somewhat in crisis mode. First the great flood, now the great freeze, with widespread fires as well—what next? “There’s an excellent chance of drought next summer,” Kenzo cackled when Frank talked to him on the phone. “We could hit for the cycle. And it’s going to get windy tomorrow.”

NSF stayed closed, along with the rest of the federal government. Frank called Diane every morning, and once when he lamented the lost work time she said “Don’t you worry about that, I’m working Congress every day, I take them out until they look like they are frostbit, and every one of them will vote for what we ask next time. It couldn’t be better.”

So Frank would wish her good luck, and spend that day cruising up and down Connecticut, hiking into the park, and helping out wherever he could, mostly with FOG work. Repair a hot box, keep them supplied with food, help lift out a tranquilized camel; always keeping an eye out for Chessman or the bros. Down to Dupont Circle, up to Adams Morgan, crossing the frozen creek-bed to get to Georgia Avenue, marveling at the stream’s white arabesques, the frolic architecture of ice and snow.

On the third night of the snap he ran into the bros, hunkered in a concrete embayment surrounding a Dupont Metro station grating. They had walled off the indentation from the sidewalk with refrigerator boxes, and cantilevered a roof of flattened boxes as well. The interior was even frosting up like an old refrigerator.

“Come on you guys,” Frank said. “You should get to one of the shelters, the wind is supposed to hit soon. This is serious.”

“It’s always been serious, Bleeder.”

“Hey who’s winning! Where’s that barrel of brandy?”

“The UDC gym is open as a shelter.”

’Tuck that.”

“This is warmer here.”

“Yeah yeah. Whatever.”

He went up into the UDC shelter himself, and spent an hour of two walking down the rows of cots, handing out paper cups of hot chocolate to the kids. The homeless or the heatless, it was hard to tell the difference in here. He ran across the knitting woman, sitting on her cot knitting away, and greeted her with pleasure. He sat and they talked for a while.

“Why won’t the guys come in?”

“They’re stubborn. What about you, have you come in?”

“Well, no. But I don’t need to.”

She smiled her gap-toothed smile. “You’re all the same.”

“Hey what about Chessman? Do you know what happened to him?”

“I don’t. He just stopped showing up. It don’t mean nothing. I think he probably moved.”

“I hope.”

She knitted on imperturbably. She had knitted herself pale yellow gloves that left her fingertips free, poking out of the fabric like tree roots. “He lived over in Northeast somewhere. His people may have moved.”

“You don’t think something bad happened to him?”

She shook her head, counting under her breath. “I don’t think so. I’ve been living out for twelve years. Hardly anything bad ever happens. It’s not so much dangerous as it is unhealthy.”

“I suppose so. Don’t you want a place?”

“Sure. But, you know. Wherever you are is a place.”

“If you see Chessman will you tell me?”

“Sure I will. I was gonna do that anyway. I’m curious myself.”

Frank wandered on up Connecticut, looking into the coffee shops and student cafes. He was not reassured by the woman’s words. Thinking about it, he started making calls to people whose whereabouts he did know. The Quiblers were fine, Charlie and Anna working from home, school cancelled, fire in the fireplace. Anna noted that hoarding had begun at the grocery stores and that this was a breakdown in social trust that could be very debilitating to normal supply dynamics. It was starting to happen at gas stations already, lines to tank up, people freezing as they waited, all on their cell phones out stamping their feet. Frank promised to drop by and say hi. Same with the Khembalis, who again offered him a place to stay, despite the crowd. He promised to drop by.

He gave Spencer a call, and the shaman picked up after the first ring. “Hello?”

“Hey why no frisbee, what the hell?”

Spencer laughed appreciatively. “We tried, believe me! But if the disks hit a tree they shatter! We broke a whole bunch of them Monday, although we did establish the low-temperature record, of course. Maybe we should try again.”

“That would be fun. Where are you guys staying, are you keeping warm?”

“Oh yeah, we’re squatting around like always, it’s fine. There’s a place on McKinley just off Nebraska that’s got good insulation and a big fireplace, you should join us, have a meal.”

“Still doing the fregan thing?”

“Sure, it works even better in this cold, the dumpsters are like big freezers.”

“Well maybe I’ll just look for you in the park.”

“Ha ha ha, you chicken. We’ll give you a call next time we go out, give me your cell phone number again.”

Then it was back on the street.

The cold snap had been going on for so long that it had somehow stabilized. Search and rescue had been turned over to the professionals, and Frank didn’t quite know what to do. He could go back in the park, he could drive into the office and do some work, he could go to Optimodal and take a hot shower… he stopped himself from thinking about plans. There was a lot to do still in Northwest, surely.

And just as he thought that he saw Cutter, out in the street working on a tree that had split and fallen across three of the four lanes. Frank joined him and offered help that Cutter gladly accepted. As they worked Cutter said that a column of water had evidently filled a crack in the trunk, then frozen and split the tree apart. Frank picked up cut branches and carried them to the pile they had established on the sidewalk. Cutter thanked him without taking an eye off his work. “You seen the park guys?”

“Yeah I ran into them, they appear to be okay.”

Cutter shook his head. “They oughta get a place.”

“No lie. You’ve got a lot of new work like this, I take it?”

“Oh lordy! We should cut down every tree in this city. They all gonna fall on something they not s’pose to.”

“I’m sure. When it’s this cold, will it kill them?”

“Not necessarily. Not except they split open like this.”

“So how do you choose which ones to work on?”

“I drive till I see one in the street.”

“Ha. Is it okay if I help you some more?”

“Of course.”

It was good work, absorbing and warm. Dodge around the work and the cars, never stop moving, get the wood off the street. The chainsaw was loud. It took four people lifting together to get the biggest section of trunk over into the gutter.

Frank stayed with them through the rest of that afternoon. The days were getting a little longer. After a while he felt comfortable enough to say, “You guys shouldn’t wear cotton against the skin, it’s the worst possible stuff for cold.”

“What, are you a vapor barrier man? I hate that shit.”

They were all black. They lived over in Northeast but had worked mostly Northwest when they had worked for City Parks. One of them went on about being from Africa and not capable of handling this kind of cold.

“We’re all from Africa,” Frank said.

“Very true but your people obviously left there before mine did. Your people look to have gone directly to the North Pole.”

“I do like the cold,” Frank admitted.

“Like to die in it.”

That night Frank slept in his van, and rejoined Cutter’s tree crew for the morning, after a dawn walk up and down the park. Deer nibbled unhappily among the snowdrifts; the rest of the animals stuck near the hot boxes. The gibbons looked more and more unhappy, but Nancy said an attempt to capture them had only caused them to swing away through the trees, hooting angrily. The zoo zoologists were thinking of trying to dart them with tranquilizers.

The air temperature remained well below zero, but now there was an almost full load of traffic back on the streets, and a great number of trees and branches to be cleared. More people walked the sidewalks, some bundled up like the Michelin Man. The tree crew put out orange plastic stripping to keep crowds away from their work, especially when things were falling. Frank carried wood. No way did he want to go up in a tree and end up like poor Byron, hollering “My leg my leg…” Chop wood, carry water; chop water, carry wood.

When they took a break for lunch he left them and walked down to see how people were doing in the UDC shelter, and at the Dupont Metro vent. Then back up to the zoo, where many people from FOG and FONZ were still working to capture the ferals. In the zoo enclosures they were reduced to supplementing the regular heating system with weird combinations of battery-powered space heaters to try to keep the enclosures a bit warmer. The animals looked miserable anyway, and quite a few had died.

It was such a busy week that Frank almost forgot when Friday rolled around, until that morning, when it became all he thought about. He ate Friday evening at the Rio Grande, then stood stamping his feet and blowing into his gloved hands at his pay phone in Bethesda.

But no call; and when it was ten after nine, he called Caroline’s number, and let it ring and ring, with never an answer.

What did that mean?

He would find out next Friday, at best. So it seemed. Suddenly their system looked very inadequate. He wanted to talk to her!

Nothing to be done. He tried one last time, listened to the ring. No answer. He had to do something else. He could go to work, or he could … no. Just leap. Deflated or not, indecisive or not.

Walking back to his van, he called Diane on his cell phone, as he had every day of the cold snap. She always answered, and her cheery voice held no huge aura of meaning or possibility. She considered that it had been a very good week for the cause. “Everybody knows now that the problem is real. This isn’t like the flood; this could happen three or four times every winter. Abrupt climate change is real, no one can deny it, and it’s a big problem. Things are a mess! So, come on in as soon as they call off the shutdown. There are things we can do.”

“Oh I will,” Frank promised.

But the cold snap went on. The jet stream was running straight south from Hudson Bay. The wind strengthened, and added to every already-existing problem—fire, frostbite, trees down, power lines down. It began to seem like street work and polar emergency services were what he had always done. Get up in the frigid van and drive to get warm. Hike out to the tree house, climb the trunk to pull Miss Piggy up a ways and tack her there on a piton; downclimb, most awkwardly. Scrounge, like a real homeless person, for cold-weather clothing he could give away at the UDC shelter. His own gear at fullest deployment was more than adequate: an old knit hat, a windbreaker shell with a hood, an old Nike ACG (All Conditions Gear, well maybe), a windstopped fleece jacket made of DuPont’s Drylete material, very warm stuff; capilene long underwear and long-sleeved shirt, Insport briefs that had a windstop panel in front, which would also hold a mitten to give his privates extra protection, until the rabbit fur arrived; then some bike shorts with the padding ripped out, some fleece knickerbockers, and then Koch pants, which covered the feet and went up to the waist, though they should have gone higher; Frank couldn’t imagine what Koch had been thinking. Then his low-topped Salomon walking boots and Thorlo synthetic socks, seamless and perfect; he even started putting one of them down the front of his pants instead of a mitten. Very rabbit-fur—like. And low-topped gaiters to keep the snow out of his boots, stylish, like black spats. Over all that, on windy days, a jacket that went down to the thighs, and covered the hands and stuck out far beyond the face; a baseball hat to keep snow off the face, help with sun in eyes. Ski gloves, snowshoes, and ski poles.

Frank could not be more set; he was probably the best-dressed man in the city. He was the Alpine man, come back to life! And his goal, Johnny Appletentlike, was to get everybody else living out-of-doors into gear that was at least adequate. Into shelters at night if the cold was too much. It was no easy task, because it called not only for acquisition of gear that was disappearing fast from all the thrift shops (though people didn’t recognize wool, apparently), but the money to fund it. He used a grant from the zoo’s feral fund, among other things, considering mat with that name it was not even a case of reprogrammed funds. But the distribution of the gear could be tricky. No one liked gratitude, but many people were cold enough to take what he gave them. Cotton and cardboard were no longer hacking it. The stubborn ones were likely to die. The newspapers reported that a few hundred already had. Frank could scarcely believe some of the stories in the Post about the dumb things people had done and were still doing. They could be six inches from safety and not recognize it. It was as John Muir had said of the Donner Party; a perfectly fine winter base camp, botched by ineptitude. But they didn’t know. It was a technique, and if you didn’t have it you died. It wasn’t rocket science but it was mandatory.

Frank had to be careful not to get careless himself. He stayed out all day every day, and part of him was beginning to think he had it wired, so that he spent longer sessions out. Sometimes he discovered he was so ravenous or thirsty that he was going to keel over; he blew into the coffee shops shivering hard, only to discover white patches on his chin, and fiendishly pinpricking fingers and ears. God knew what was happening to his poor nose. Emergency infusions of hot chocolate, then, blowing across the top and burning his mouth to gulp some down, burning his esophagus, feeling his insides burning while his extremities fizzed with cold. Hot chocolate was the perfect start on a return to proper heat and energy. Cinnamon rolls too; he was coming to believe that cinnamon was a powerful stimulant and that it also allowed him to see better in the black-and-white of his dawn and dusk patrols. Shifting dapple under cloudy moonlight, it didn’t matter to him now, he saw the structure of Washington, D.C., and Rock Creek Park underneath all that chiaroscuro, high on the magic spice.

One night he found the bros back in the park, around a very hospitable bonfire. Just outside the light the body of a deer lay partly skinned, steaks hacked out of its flank.

“—so fucking cold it made me stupid.”

“Like that’s what did it.”

“—I couldn’t even talk for a couple days. Like my tongue was froze. Then I could talk, but I only knew like ten words.”

“That happened to me,” Fedpage put in. “I started talking in old English, and then German. You know, ‘Esh var kalt.’ The Germans really know how to say it. And then it was just grunts and moans for a while. ‘Fur esh var kallllt.’ ”

“You’re funny Fedpage. You were wasted in Vietnam.”

“I was indeed wasted in Vietnam.”

Fluctuating radiant pulses of heat washed over their faces.

Frank sat by the fire and watched it burn. “So you guys really were in Vietnam.”

“Of course.”

“You must be pretty old then.”

“We are pretty old then! Fuck you. How the fuck old are you?”

“Forty-three.”

“What a kid.”

“We’re twice as old as that, kid. No wonder your nose bleeds.”

“In point of fact I’m fifty-eight,” said Fedpage.

“Boomer scum.”

“Yeah, he went to the University of Vietnam.”

“So what was it like?”

“It was fucked! What do you think?”

“At least it wasn’t cold,” Zeno said dourly. “It might have been fucked but at least you didn’t freeze your dick off.”

“I told you to put a sock down there.”

“Put a sock on it! Good idea!”

Fedpage, solemn, calculating: “I would need one of them knee socks.”

General mirth. Discussion of burning needle sensation during penile thawing. Listing of exceptional cases of genital trauma. Frank watched Zeno brood. Zeno noticed and snapped, “It was fucked, man.”

“It was everything,” Fedpage said.

“That’s true. It was every kind of thing. There were some guys over there who joined up specifically to kill people. Some people were like that. But most of them weren’t, and for them it was hell. They didn’t know what hit them. We just did what we were told and tried to stay alive.”

“Which we did.”

“But we were lucky! It was sheer dumb luck. When we were in Danang we could just as easily been over-run.”

“What happened there?” Frank said.

“We got caught by the Tet offensive—”

“He don’t know about any of that. We were cut off, okay? We were surrounded in a town and we got hammered. They killed a lot of us and they would have killed all of us except the Air Force made some passes. Bombed the shit out of those NVA.”

“Dropped us food too.”

“That’s right, we were going to starve as well as get massacred. It was a race to see which. Incompetent bastards.”

“We shared the last food, remember that?”

“Of course. A fucking spoonful. Didn’t do any of us a bit of good.”

“It was a team thing. You should have seen Zeno the time we heloed down into a minefield and the medic wouldn’t get out to help some wounded. Zeno just jumped out and ran right across that minefield, he led those brothers back in just like there weren’t no mines out there. Even after one of them went off and dee-exed a guy who didn’t follow right in his footsteps.”

“You did that?” Frank said.

“Yeah well,” Zeno said. He looked away, shrugged. “That was my Zeno’s paradox moment I guess. I mean if you’re always only halfway there, then you can’t ever step on no mine, right?”

Frank laughed.

“It was great,” Fedpage insisted.

“No it wasn’t. It was just what it was. Then you get back to the States and it’s all like some bad movie. Some stupid fucking sitcom. That’s America man. It’s all such bullshit. People act like they’re such big deals, they act like all their rules are real when really they’re just bullshit so they can keep you down and take everything for themselves.”

“True,” Fedpage said.

“Ha ha. Well, here we are. Looks like the fire is about halfway down. Who’s going to go get more wood for this fire, I ain’t gonna do it.”

“So did you ever go up to the shelter?”

“Sure.”

The hard wind finally struck as forecast, and it got bad again for a couple days, as bad as in the beginning. “It ain’t the cold, it’s the—”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Frozen branches snapped and fell all over town, on people, cars, power lines, rooftops. Frank went out every day and helped Cutter and his crew. Then one day, clearing a fallen tree from a downed power line, a branch swung his way and thwacked him on the face.

“Oh sorry I couldn’t get that! Hey Frank! Hey are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Frank said, hands at his face. He still couldn’t feel his nose. He tasted blood at the back of his throat, swallowed. It was nothing new. It happened from time to time. It even tasted like old blood, left over from the original injury. He shook it off, kept on carrying wood.

The next morning, however, he got out of his van and walked up and down Connecticut, and—he couldn’t decide what to do. Time for a leap before you look, therefore; do whatever came to hand. But where to start?

He never got started. He walked up Connecticut to Chevy Chase Circle, then back down to the zoo. How big the world became when it tasted like blood.

He stopped at a stoplight to think it over. He could help at the zoo, or he could help Cutter, or he could look for Chessman, or he could help at the shelter, or he could go to work, or he could go for a run, or a hike, or a climb. Or he could read a book. His current reading was The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder, a real beauty, the story of a small Dakota town surviving the extreme winter of 1880. The town had lost all contact with the rest of humanity, cut off by huge snowpacks from October to May. Talk about island refugia! He had gotten to the part where they were almost starving.

So he could read. He could sit in a coffee shop and read his book, and no one would have any reason to object. Or he could go work out at the club. Or…

He was still standing aimlessly at the corner of Connecticut and Tilden when his cell phone rang.

It was Nick Quibler. School had been cancelled for the day, and he was wondering if Frank was available to go on a FOG hunt.

“I sure am,” Frank croaked. “Thanks for thinking of it.”

When Charlie got home from the grocery store, where the shelves had been largely empty, Anna and Joe were out, but Nick was already back, playing his gameboy.

“Hey Nick, how was your FOG trip with Frank?”

“Oh. Well, it wasn’t a big accident.”

“Uh oh.” This phrase was a family joke, recalling a time when a much younger Nick had tried to delay telling his parents about something bad he had caused to happen at preschool; but this time Nick wasn’t smiling. Curiously focused on his gameboy, in fact. “What do you mean it wasn’t a big accident?”

“Well, you know. No people got hurt.”

“That’s good, but what did happen?”

“Well. You know. It wasn’t so good for one of the gibbons.”

“Uh oh, how so?”

“One died.”

“Oh no! How did it happen?” Hand to Nick’s shoulder; Nick stayed focused on the game. “What happened, bud?”

“Well you see, it’s too cold for them now.”

“I bet! That’s true for a lot of the animals, right?”

“Right. And so they have these heated shelters out in the park, and all the animals are using them now, but some of the animals are hard to catch even when they do use them. The gibbons and siamangs are like that, they sit on the roofs and run away if you try to get close, and some of them have died. They found two of them frozen. So they decided they better try to capture the ones still out there, before they died too.”

“That makes sense.”

“Yeah, but they’re really hard to get near. They swing through the trees? It’s really cool. So you have to kind of hunt them down if you want to, you know.”

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah. You have to shoot them with a tranquilizer dart.”

“Oh yeah. I used to see that on Wild Kingdom.”

“They do it on Animal Planet all the time.”

“Do they. That’s good to know. That’s continuity. But I remember one time when I was a kid, this hippo got out of Lion Country Safari, and they shot it with too much.”

“No, not that.”

“What then?”

“Well, they’re always up in the trees. And Frank is the only one who can really get very close to them.”

“Ha. Our Frank is something.”

“Yeah, he can sound just like them. And he can walk without making any noise. It’s really cool.”

“How the heck does he do that?”

“He looks where he’s going! I mean he walks along and his face is pointed right down at the ground most of the time.”

“Like a dog?”

“No, more like a bird. He’s always looking around, zip zip, you know.”

“Ah yeah. And so?”

“So we were up by Military Road and we got a call that someone had spotted a gibbon pair near the Nature Center going down toward the creek, so we went down the creekbed, you can walk right on the ice, and we got in those rocks down by the creek?”

“Which?”

“The Nook and Cranny rocks, you can see through the cranny upstream, and so we laid in wait for a while and—”

“What do you do when you’re lying in wait?”

“We just stand there real quiet. You can be careful about how you breathe, it’s pretty cool.”

“Ah yeah. And so then?”

“So then three gibbons came past us, and they weren’t up very high and Frank had the gun balanced on the Nook and was ready for them. He shot one right in the butt, but then some people yelled.”

“Other FOG people?”

“No, just we didn’t know who, and the gibbons took off and Frank took off running after them.”

“Didn’t you too?”

“Yeah I did, but he was fast. I couldn’t keep up. So but neither could he, not with the gibbons, they just fly along, but the one he shot fell. From way up there.”

“Oh no.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh no. So Frank couldn’t.

“No, he tried but he couldn’t keep up. He wasn’t there to catch it.”

“So it died?”

“Yeah. Frank picked it up. He checked it out.”

“He was hoping it was still alive.”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t. It got killed by the fall. I mean it looked okay, but it was… loose. It wasn’t there.”

“Oh no. How awful. What did Frank do?”

“He was kind of upset.”

The bare branches overhead were like black lightning bolts striking out of the Earth into the clouds. Like decision maps, first choose this, then that. He was cold, cold in his head somehow. All his thoughts congealed. Maybe if he weren’t injured. Maybe next winter. Maybe if it wasn’t a long winter. Maybe they all had to find their cave. Fur esh var kalt.

Wind ripped through the branches with a sound like tearing cloth. A big sound. Under it the city hummed almost inaudibly. Snow cracked as he stepped on it. There was no way to walk quietly now. The branches overhead were like black fireworks, flailing the sky. He moved under them toward the gorge, shifting his weight one pound at a time.

Eventually he came to one of the heated shelters. Little square hut, its open side facing south. Hot box; all interior surfaces emanated heat. Like a big toaster oven left open. A bad thought, given the way toaster ovens worked.

Inside, and scattered around the opening, they stood or sat or lay. Rabbits, raccoons, deer, elands, tapirs, even foxes, even a bobcat. Two ibex. None meeting the eye of any other; all pretending they were each alone, or with only their own kind. As on an island created in a flood, it was a case of stay there or die. Truce. Time out.

Very slowly he approached. He kept his head down, his eyes to the side. He sidled. He crabbed. Shoulders hunched lower and lower. He turned his back to them entirely as he closed on them, and sat down in the lee of the shelter, about fifteen feet out from it, in a little hollow floored with snow. He shifted back toward them to get off the snow, onto a decomposed black log. Fairly dry, fairly comfortable. The heat from the shelter was palpable, it rushed over him intermittently on the wind, like a stream. He rested his head on his chest, arms around his knees. A long time passed; he wasn’t sleepy, but long intervals passed during which no thoughts came to him. A gust of chill air roused him, and he shifted so he could see more of the shelter out of the corner of his eye. At the very edge of his peripheral vision lay what could have been the jaguar.

The animals were not happy. They all stared at him, wary, affronted. He was messing up a good situation. The lion had lain down with the lamb, but the man was not welcome. He wanted to reassure them, to explain to them that he meant no harm, that he was one of them. But there were no words.

Much later there was a crack, a branch breaking. In a sudden flurry many animals slipped away.

Frank looked up. It was Drepung, and Charlie Quibler. They approached him, crouched by his side. “Come with us, Frank,” Drepung said.