Fifty Degrees Below

VIII. ALWAYS GENEROUS

The scientific literature on the effects of damage to the prefrontal cortex was vast. Its existence bespoke a variety and quantity of human suffering that was horrible to contemplate, but never mind; it was rehearsed here in the course of attempting to reduce that suffering. Among the cases discussed were traumas so much worse than what Frank had experienced that he felt chastened, abashed, lucky, frightened. He wasn’t even sure his brain had been injured. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t just a broken nose and the taste of blood at the back of his throat. Not much compared to an iron spike through the skull.

Nevertheless it was his injury, and how he felt about it was now also part of the symptomatology, because emotions were generated or coordinated or felt in the prefrontal cortex, and so the precise kind of emotional change experienced was an indication of what trauma might have occurred. The dysfunction could be very precise and limited: some subjects were rendered incapable of compassion or embarrassment but could still feel happiness or fear, others felt no dismay or even laughed at crippling disabilities they were quite aware of, and so on. Trauma victims thus became in effect experiments, testing what happened if you removed parts of a very complex system.

Frank clicked and read apprehensively, reminding himself that knowledge was power. “Fear and Anxiety: possible roles of the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis.” “Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala.” The amygdala was behind the nose, a little distance in. A famous case of short-term amnesia had been nicked in the amygdala when a fencing foil went in through his nose.

“Emotion: an evolutionary byproduct of the neural regulation of the autonomic nervous system.” The sociobiological view, for once of less interest to Frank. He would come back to that later. “Reciprocal limbic-cortical functioning and decision-making: converging PET findings in lack of affect and indecision.” “Neuroanatomical correlates of happiness, sadness, and decisiveness. “Both studies of the emotion/decision connection. “Subgenual prefrontal cortex abnormalities in mood disorders.” A study of a case who was unusually wild and incompetent in life decisions, unlike anyone else in her family, and then they remembered that when she was an infant a car had run over her head.

“From the nose to the brain.” Oh my; there were synapses that ran from one end of the head to the other. They went from the nose to everywhere. Scent, memory, behaviors associated with pleasure. These tapped into dopamine that was made available in the nucleus accumbens in the basal forebrain, behind the back of the mouth. This availability depended on a long biochemical sequence functioning well at every point.

The right frontal cortices were more associated with negative emotions than the left; the right somatosensory cortices were active in integrating body management, which might be why they were the apparent seat of empathy. Blocking oxytocin in a female prairie vole did not interfere with its sex drive, but with the attachment to its partner that would usually correlate to sex. Suppressing vasopressin had the same effect on male voles, who would normally be faithful for life, voles being monogamous. You needed both the insula and the anterior cingulate working well to be able to experience joy. Fluency of ideation increased with joy, decreased with sorrow. The brain was often flooded with endogenous opioid peptides such as endomorphines, enkephalin, dynorphin, endorphins—all painkillers. You needed those. Brain systems that supported ethical behaviors were probably not dedicated to ethics exclusively, but rather also to biological regulation, memory, decision-making, and creativity. In other words, to everything. You needed joy to function well. In fact, it appeared that competent or successful decision-making depended on full capability in all the emotions; and these in turn depended on a healthy prefrontal cortex.

It looked to Frank like all the new research was adding up to a new understanding of the roles played by the various elements of human thought, consciousness, behavior; a new model or paradigm, in which emotion and feeling were finally understood to be indispensable in the process of proper reasoning. Decision-making in particular was a reasoning process in which the outcomes of various possible solutions were judged in terms of how they might feel. Without that, the ability to decide well was crippled. This was Damasio’s main point: the definition of reason as a process that abjured all emotion had been wrong. Descartes and most of Western philosophy since the Greeks had been wrong. It was the feel one was looking for.

Judging from the evolutionary history of the brain, it seemed clear that feelings had entered the picture in prehuman species, as part of social behaviors. Sympathy, attachment, embarrassment, pride, submission, censure and recompense, disgust (at cheaters), altruism, compassion; these were social feelings, and arrived early on, perhaps before language and the “string of sentences” that often seemed to constitute conscious thought. And they were perhaps more important, as overall cognitive strategy was formed by unconscious mentation in regions such as the ventromedial frontal lobe (right behind the nose). Life was feeling one’s way toward a goal which ultimately equated to achieving and maintaining certain feelings.

So an excess of reason was indeed a form of madness! Just as Rudra Cakrin had said in his lecture. It was something the Buddhist tradition had discovered early on, by way of introspection and analysis alone. A kind of science, a natural history.

Which was impressive, but Frank found himself comforted to have the assertion backed by scientific research and a neurological explanation. Or some first hypotheses concerning explanations. For one thing it was a chance to come at the problem in a fresh way, with new data. Buddhist thinkers, and those in the Western philosophical tradition who used introspection and logic alone to postulate “how the mind works,” had been mulling over the same data for five thousand years, and now seemed caught up in preconceptions, distinctions, and semantic hairsplitting of all kinds. Introspection did not give them the means to investigate unconscious thought; and unconscious thought was proving to be crucial. Even consciousness, standing there in the mirror to be looked at (maybe)—even what could be introspected or deduced was so extremely complex, and distributed through so many different parts of the parcellated brain, that you could not think your way through it. It needed a group effort, working on the physical action inside the object itself. It needed science.

And now science was using new tools to move beyond its first achievements in taxonomy and basic junction; it was getting into analysis of evidence collected from living minds, from brains both healthy and damaged. It was a huge effort, involving many labs and scientists, and still involved in the process of paradigm construction. Some academic philosophers cast scorn on the simplicity of these researchers’ early models, but to Frank it was better than continuing to elaborate theories generated by the evidence of introspection alone. Obviously there was still far to go, but until you took the first steps you would never be on the way.

It was noticeable that the Dalai Lama always welcomed the new results from brain science. It would help Buddhists to refine their own beliefs, he said; it was the obvious thing to do. And it was true that many academic philosophers interested in consciousness also welcomed the new findings.

Welcomed or not, all the papers from the new body of work were accumulating on the net. And so Frank lay there in bed, reading them on his laptop, unable to figure out what he felt, or what he should do next, or if he might have a physical problem. Damasio, a leader in this new research: “The system is so complex and multilayered that it operates with some degree of freedom.” Oh yes, he was free, no doubt of that—but was he damaged? What did he feel? What was this feeling, like oceans of clouds in his chest? And what should he do next?

The Khembali house in Arlington was just as crowded as Frank had thought it would be, maybe even more so. It was a big house, perhaps built to be a boarding house from the start, with a ground floor of big public rooms and three floors of bedrooms above, many of them off long central hallways, and an extensive basement. But as a good percentage of the Khembali populace was being housed in these rooms, all of them were overflowing.

Clearly it would be best if he continued to live out of his van, using the bathrooms at NSF and Optimodal. But his Khembali friends were adamant in their invitation.

Sucandra said, “Please, Frank. Join Rudra Cakrin in his room. No one else will move in there, and yet he needs someone. And he likes you.”

“Doesn’t he like everybody?”

Sucandra and Padma regarded each other.

“Rudra was the oracle,” Padma told Frank.

“So?”

Sucandra said, “It seems one old Bon spirit that used to visit him comes back from time to time.”

“Also,” Padma added, “he seems to feel we have lost Tibet. Or failed to recover it. He doesn’t think he will see it again in this life. It makes him …”

“Irritable.”

“Angry.”

“Perhaps a little mad.”

“He does not blame you for any of this, however.”

“To him you represent another chance for Tibet.”

“No, he just likes you. He knows the situation with Tibet is hopeless, at least for some time to come.”

An exile. Frank had never been an exile in the formal sense, and never would be; but living on the East Coast had given him a profound sense of not being at home. Bioregional displacement, one might say; and for a long time he had hated this place. Only in the last year had the forest begun to teach him how it could be loved. And if the great eastern hardwood forest had repelled him, how much more might it repel a man from the treeless roof of the world? Who could never go home?

So Frank felt he understood that part of Rudra’s moodiness. The visiting demon, however … Well, these were religious people. They weren’t the only religious people Frank knew. It should resemble talking to Baptists, and he had gotten used to that. It was just another worldview in which the cosmos was filled with invisible agents, intervening in human affairs.

He could always focus on the shared pain of displacement. Besides, Sucandra and Padma were asking for his help.

So that night Drepung took him in to see Rudra Cakrin, in a tiny room off the stair landing before the flight to the attic, a space that might once have been a closet. There was only room for a single bed and a slot between it and the wall.

Rudra was sitting up in bed. He had been ill, and looked much older than Frank had ever seen him. “Please to see you,” he said, peering up at him as they shook hands. “You are my new English teacher, Drepung say. You teach me English, I teach you Tibetan.”

“That would be good,” Frank said.

“Very good. My English better than your Tibetan.” He smiled, his face folding into its map of laugh wrinkles. “I don’t know how we fit two beds in here.”

“I can unroll a groundpad down here,” Frank suggested. “Take it up by day.”

“Good idea. You don’t mind sleep on floor?”

“I’ve been sleeping in a tree.”

Startled, Rudra refocused on Frank. Again the strange intensity of his gaze; he looked right into you. And who else had Frank told about his tree house? No one but Caroline.

“Good idea!” Rudra said. “One thing right away—I cannot be, what say— guru for you.”

“That’s okay, I already have a guru. He teaches me frisbee.”

“Good idea.”

Afterward Frank said to Drepung, “He seems fine to me.”

“So you will share a room with him?”

“Whatever you like. I’m your guest. You decide.”

“Thank you. I think it will be good for both of you.”

There was no denying that Frank felt deeply uneasy about moving indoors, as if he were breaking a promise to someone. A kind of guilt, but more importantly a profound physical unease, a tightness in the chest, a numbness in the head. But it was more all-encompassing than that.

On waking in the mornings he would get up from his groundpad in Rudra’s room, roll it up, stick it under Rudra’s bed, go downstairs and out the door, almost sick to his stomach with anxiety. Shivering in the driver’s seat of his van, he would wake up the rest of the way, then drive over to Optimodal, getting there just as they unlocked the doors. Diane was often already there waiting, slapping her mittened hands together. She always had a cheery smile to greet him. He found her consistency impressive. Sometimes his smile in response must have looked wan indeed. And in fact she sometimes put a hand to his arm and asked if he were all right. He always nodded. Yes; all right. Not good not bad. Not anything he could define. Nose still stuffed up, yes, but otherwise okay. Ready to go.

And in they would go, for a workout that now had the two of them wandering semi-autonomously; they had got past feeling they needed to team up to be friendly, and merely did their own things in such an order that they were often in the same room, and could sometimes talk, or help out with weights or holding ankles. Then it was off to the showers and the daily blessing of hot water running over him. Presumably on the other side of the wall Diane was doing the same under a shower of her own. By now Frank could visualize pretty well what Diane would look like. She would look good. Probably this didn’t matter. It only made him worry about Caroline and what might have happened to her.

But he worked every day with Diane, and he couldn’t help but admire how skillful she was, and determined. They were entering the final stage of arrangements for the North Atlantic intervention, and Diane now devoted a good part of every day talking to the people running the various parts of it. The International Maritime Organization was in charge of shipping; UNEP was making arrangements for salt; the big four re-insurance companies were providing or raising most of the funding. Wracke and the Corps were providing engineering and logistics.

There were some 3,500 oil tankers in operation around the world, they had learned, and about thirty percent of those were still the older single-hulled kind that were legally required to be replaced. Five hundred Very Large Crude Carriers were identified by the IMO as being past due for retirement and potentially available for sale or lease, and as the alternative to a deal would be either the breaker’s yard or legal complications, the ship owners were being very accommodating. These old single-hulled VLCCs had an average capacity of ten million tons, small compared to the Ultra Large Crude Carriers now replacing them, but taken altogether, enough to do the job. The real problem here would be maintaining oil supplies at an adequate level with so much shipping taken out of transport all at once, but plans were being made to build up reserves, speed the construction of new double-hulled ULCCs, and return some of the superannuated fleet to oil transport once the salt operation was done.

So shipping capacity was not proving to be the choke point on the operation. More difficult was coming up with enough salt. Five hundred million metric tons turned out to be equal to about two years of total world production. When the working group first learned this they wondered if the project was impossible, at least in the time frame Diane was calling for. But Diane ordered the group to find out how quickly supplementary salt production could be ramped up. It soon became clear that the 225 million tons a year was more a matter of demand than supply; the salt industry in the Caribbean alone had years of salt dried in the pans ready to go, and the hardrock mines of New Brunswick and the rest of Canada also had a huge inventory, although it was more difficult to speed up extraction there than in the salt pans. In general there was a much greater productive capacity than was needed. Annual supply of highway rock salt in the U.S. only amounted to thirty million tons a year. So there was excess salt, ready at hand in almost every drying pan and hardrock mine on the planet.

So the plan was physically possible, and the winter’s unprecedented harshness meant it was now greeted with cries of hope and anticipation, rather than the raised eyebrows and shaking heads that had met it the previous summer. Indeed the futures market in salt had already jumped, Frank was interested to learn; prices had shot up five hundred percent. Fortunately enough futures had been bought by Swiss Re to bypass this inflation. Already production had been amped up, and the full complement of salt would be ready later that year, at about the same time the fleet of tankers would be ready to be filled. As far as Diane could tell, the project was on course for a rendezvous of the fleet in the north Atlantic that fall. The unlikely-sounding idea first broached in Diane’s office was going to happen, at a total cost of what looked to be about a hundred billion dollars. Swiss Re reported that they were on schedule in their fundraising, and anticipated no problems.

“That’s how desperate this winter has made people,” Edgardo observed.

“I told you the cold snap was a good thing,” Diane replied.

Frank found it interesting, but beyond that felt little. It was hard to connect all the activity to the brainstorming of last summer, when it had been only one of many ideas, and not the most likely at that. Now it had the look of something obvious and inevitable, what Edgardo called a silver bullet solution; a grand exercise in planetary engineering that was exciting worldwide attention, funding, and controversy.

Very interesting indeed; but now it was out of their hands, and Frank’s daily work centered on other things. The Carbon Capture Campaign legislation was about to be introduced by one of Phil Chase’s allies on the House Resources Committee, and Frank was involved with the graphs and tables evaluating various options and scenarios. Then also the test result evaluations on three different heat-to-electricity transformers had to be finished; and the SSEEP project was still generating huge amounts of trouble for NSF, as many accused them of illegally entering into presidential politics, and in a most crassly unfashionable old-left way at that. Diane occasionally thought she would get fired over it, although there was no mechanism or precedent. The heat was coming from all directions—even the Phil Chase campaign, which now appeared to regard the SSEEP platform as some kind of third-party competition. Judging by the results so far, it had possibly been a bad idea to suggest a scientific approach to political problems, but on most days Frank was still glad they had tried it. Something had to be done. Although choosing which something remained a problem. One morning, walking from Optimodal to work, Diane said to him, “So what are you going to work on this morning?”

And Frank, distracted, said, “I don’t know. I could meet with Kenzo, or talk to George in Engineering, or call Yann. Or I could work on the Stirling calculations, or check into those flexible mirrors. Or call up the photovoltaics group. Or I could call Wracke, or the people at NASA to see if their heavy-duty booster is going to be ready this decade. Or there are these glassy metals I could—”

The light changed and they crossed Wilson. Diane, laughing at him, said, “You sound like I feel.” But she didn’t know how he felt; and he truly didn’t know what to do. But then going into the building, the way she looked up at him, he saw that she knew that.

Edgardo and Kenzo dropped by to ask him if he wanted to join them for a run, as he hadn’t for a while. He agreed to it, and they got dressed and took off.

It was crisp but sunny, perfect for running. It turned out Edgardo and Kenzo had run all winter long, except for during the cold snap. They were the most faithful of the faithful, also the most talkative of the talkative, which no doubt explained it. Only on a long run could you hold the floor for ten or fifteen minutes straight, discoursing on some subject or other while your audience pounded along, happy to listen because it distracted from their effort.

Edgardo was still the main talker, perhaps only because he was in the best running shape, and could natter on while the others were having to huff and puff. “Yes,” he was explaining to Bob, “the series is called the Alexandria Quartet.”

“Someone wrote four books about Alexandria?”

“That would be Alexandria, Egypt.”

“Oh!”

“Good books, really. Heavily dependent on Proust, of course, but how bad is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I read a good book,” Frank offered, having contributed nothing to the conversation. “The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.”

“Some kind of children’s writer?” Edgardo guessed.

“Yes, she wrote Little House on the Prairie, and a whole bunch of others. You’d call her a girl’s writer I guess, but this book was as good as anything I’ve ever read. Better, really. I mean really. I can’t remember reading a better novel.”

Edgardo laughed delightedly: “The great American novel! Here is all this debate about which is the Great American Novel, and meanwhile the real thing is a girl’s book hiding right under our noses.”

“I think so.”

“That would be so wonderful. But I have to suspect your judgment has perhaps been influenced by the winter we have just lived through. Content of a work of art tends to influence people’s aesthetic judgment to an unfortunate extent.”

“Like Anna’s husband Charlie, thinking Mr. Mom is Hollywood’s greatest movie.”

“Ha. Exactly! We love the art that tells our story. Maybe that’s why I love the Quartet so much. Expatriate angst in a steamy exotic city, full of sin and craziness. Maybe it’s the same Alexandria after all.”

“And is that why The Triplets of Belleville is your favorite movie?”

“Yes! Story of my life, every single detail of it, right down to the frogs. Right down to the dog!’

On they ran, laughing at Edgardo.

In the evenings Frank returned to the Khembali house. He learned that it had an “entertaining kitchen,” occupying the back half of the house’s ground floor. It had been big to begin with, and was now equipped as if for a restaurant and bakery. Its exquisite heat always enveloped a dozen women and half a dozen men, shouting over the steamy clangor in Tibetan, and also a guttural English that was like Indian English but not. Frank now understood why they sometimes put subtitles under the Dalai Lama on film when he was speaking English.

Early on Drepung introduced Frank to two men and three women, all of whom spoke this English Frank could barely understand.

“So good to have you,” one said.

“Welcome to Khembalung,” said another.

“Can I help?” Frank asked.

“Yes. The bread will soon be ready to take out, and there are many potatoes to peel for dinner.”

“How many do you feed per meal?” Frank asked later, surveying the bustle as he scraped the skin off a potato.

“Hundred. First hundred eat here, the rest have to eat out. Or leftovers. Makes people timely.”

“Wow”

Sucandra came by when he was finished and led him out back past a frozen compost heap to show him the backyard, now a frozen garden patch and a small greenhouse, the steamy clear plastic walls gleaming greenly, like a shower stall for vegetable people. “Best to join garden duty now,” Sucandra suggested. “It will be very nice in the spring.”

Frank nodded, inspecting the trees in the yard. Possibly one at the back could support a platform. Something to bring up later, obviously.

Sucandra and Padma’s room was a half-flight below Frank and Rudra’s. This meant Frank had other acquaintances to talk to, even when Rudra was asleep or Drepung was gone. Sometimes one of them came up to translate something Rudra had failed to communicate in English but still wanted to say. Mostly the two new roommates were left to hash it out on their own. In practice this meant a few exchanges a day, combining with a formal lesson in the last hour before the old man fell asleep. Rudra would nod out over Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, muttering in his gravelly low voice, “chalk, pencil sharpener, milk, cookies, paper clip, thumbtacks, lost clothing drawer,” chuckling as his finger tapped on the latest appearance of the pig man with the windblown hat. He would tell Frank the Tibetan words for these items, sometimes, but the main focus of their sessions was on English; Frank could learn Tibetan or not, Rudra did not care, he even appeared to scoff at the idea. “What’s the use?” he would growl. “Tibet gone, ha.” Many odd things appeared to strike him funny, and he laughed with an abrupt low “Ha,” as if laughter were a surprise attack against invisible demons.

Frank was content to lie there on his groundpad in the evening, listening to the old man read and occasionally correcting his pronunciation. Usually Frank worked on his laptop.

“Pumpkin, ghost, what say? What say?” This was something the Khembalis often said as a kind of “um” or “er” as they searched for the right word or expression, so Frank had to be prompted to treat it as a real question.

“Oh sorry. That’s a witch on a broom, but he’s made the witch an owl in this case.”

“Ghost festival?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“That is very danger.” Tibetan was made of syllable roots that stayed the same in different word forms, and Frank noticed that a lot of the Khembalis used English nouns the same way, letting them do the work of verbs and modifiers: “You will learn to meditation.” “He became enlightenment.”

As they drifted off to sleep the two of them would hold strange conversations, involving both languages and a lot of confusion. Companionship without comprehension; it was just the kind of company that suited Frank. It reminded him of the bros in the park. In fact he told Rudra about his acquaintances in the park, and the winter they had had.

“Wandering tramps are often spirits in disguise.”

“I’m sure.”

The whole situation in the household was proving more congenial to Frank than he had expected it to be. Not knowing the language excused him from many conversations, but there were always people around; a crowd, faces gradually known, amazing faces, but few of them named or spoken to. That too was somewhat like being in the park with the bros. But it was warmer; and easier. He didn’t have to decide where to be so often, where to go. What to do next— it was as simple as that. He didn’t have to decide what to do every hour or so. That was hard even without damage to the prefrontal cortex.

One decision remained easy; on Friday after work, he drove over to Bethesda and ate at Rio Grande, and then at quarter to nine he was standing before his telephone at the Metro bus stop. He waited through nine, and at 9:05 called Caroline’s number. No answer.

He wondered if he could find out the location of her number. But would knowing it help him in any way, given that she didn’t appear to be going there? What could have happened? What he should do? What might keep her from calling? Deep uneasiness was almost indistinguishable from fear.

He was walking sightlessly down Wisconsin toward his van, deep in his uneasiness, when his cell phone rang. He snatched it out of his pocket, while at the same time seeing that he was standing right before the elevator box that he and Caroline had emerged from last year. His heart leaped—“Hello?”

“Frank it’s me.”

“Oh good. What’s happening?”

“—really sorry, I couldn’t get there last week and I thought I’d be able to make it this week but I couldn’t. I can’t talk long. I just slipped out.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Well yeah, but look I need to just set up another call here and get off. He’s suddenly asking me to do things on Fridays and I don’t know if it means anything, but can you be there at that number next Monday at nine?”

“Sure but hey listen, can you make a call to the Khembali embassy house in Arlington? They’re not under his surveillance are they?”

“I don’t think so. Who are they?”

“Embassy of Khembalung, their house is in Arlington. I’m staying there now and so you can call me there whenever you get free. In the evenings I’ll likely be around.”

“Okay I’ll look for a chance and call soon. I’m so sorry about this. He’s changed jobs again and it’s getting really complicated.”

“That’s okay, I’m just glad to hear from you!”

“Yeah I bet, I mean I would be too. I’ll call real soon okay?”

“Okay.”

“Love you bye.”

It was amazing how much better he felt. Lack of affect was clearly not his problem; on the contrary, he had to avoid being overwhelmed by feelings. Giddy with relief, happy, worried, pleased, in love, frightened: but what did all those feelings combined add up to? This was what the studies never seemed to discuss, that you could feel so many different things at the same time. He felt Caroline. The uncanny presence of their elevator box, standing there before him throughout their conversation, had given him a palpable sense of her, an instant connection from the moment she spoke. Some quality in her voice drew his affections out. He wanted her to be happy. He wanted to be with her.

Leap before you look, stop trying to decide, just act on the spur of the moment. On Saturday he went over to Rock Creek, first to move most of his stuff from his tree house to his van, then to play a round with Spencer and Robert and Robin. The frisbees still tended to shatter if they hit a tree straight on, but other than that the frisbee guys seemed fine with the hard winter. Spencer said it was the same with all the fregans. They were Ice Age people, running with the aurochs and the wolves.

And the bros were back by their fire, stubbornly waiting out the cold. The pile of ashes in their fireplace was huge, and the area beyond Sleepy Hollow where the deer carcasses lay was beginning to look like a real shambles. Fedpage handed Frank a paper plate with a scorched venison steak when he sat down at the picnic table.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. It’s a little bloody, but—”

“Blood for the hemophiliac! Just what he needs!”

“Uh huh. Hey Fedpage, how many spy agencies are there in the federal government?”

“Sixteen.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s how many they admit to. Actually there’s more. It’s like those Russian nested dolls, with blacks and superblacks inside.”

“Spy versus spy.”

“That’s right. They fight like dogs. They guard their turf by getting blacker.” This statement made Cutter laugh. “Nobody even knows everything that’s out there, I judge. Not the president nor anyone else.”

“How can that happen?”

“There’s no enemy, that’s why. They pretend there’s terrorists, but that’s just to scare people. Actually they like terrorists. That’s why they went into Iraq, they got oil and a bunch of terrorists, it was a two-for-one. Much smarter than Vietnam. Because it’s all about funding. The spooks’ job is to spy on each other and keep their funding.”

“Shit,” Frank said. He prodded his steak, which suddenly tasted off. “I think you guys need to kill another deer maybe.”

“Ha nothing wrong with that deer! It’s Fedpage making you sick!”

On some afternoons Frank walked around Arlington. He had never spent much time there, and this was an odd time to get acquainted with it, its big streets were so wintry. Broad avenues ran for miles westward, past knots of tall buildings erupting out of the forest in every kind of mediocre urban conglomeration. It was possible to walk to the Khembali house from NSF in half an hour, so some days he did that, and got in a winter hike through the snow’s bizarre masonry, with cars belching past like steam-powered vehicles.

At night after dinner he usually went up to his room and read on his mattress, chatting with Rudra every half hour or so. Otherwise he drifted around on the internet, looking things up under the long list of sites that came when he googled Khembalung. What he read in these rambles often caused him to shake his head.

before the great guru Milarepa left Tibet for the Glorious Copper-Colored Mountain, he made a tour of Tibet, among other tasks finding hidden valleys, or beyuls

“Guru Rudra, what is a beyul?”

“Hidden valley.”

“Like Khembalung?”

“Yes.”

“But you were on an island?”

“Hidden valley moves from time to time. This seems to be what Rikdzin Godem says. He was the guru who knew about the hidden valley. From Tsang. Fourteenth century. He talked about the Eight Great Hidden Valleys, but Khembalung seems to be only one that ever appeared. A refuge from the kaliyuga, fourth of the four ages. Iron age of degradation and despair.”

“Is that what we’re in?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“Ha ha. What else did he say about them?”

“He say many things. Many books. He told location and described how to get in. When it would be good to enter, what would be the omens. What say, the power places in Khembalung. The magic.”

“Oh my. And what was that?”

“Like Khembalung as you saw it. A place for good. A buddhafield.”

“Buddhafield?”

“A space where Buddhism is working.”

“I see.”

“Compassion increase, wisdom.”

“And Khembalung was like that.”

“Yes.”

“And where was it, before your island?”

“At head of Arun valley. Phumchu, we call it in Tibetan. And over Tsibri La, into Tibet. That was the trouble.”

“China?”

“Yes.”

“Why is China so much trouble, do you think?”

“China is big. Like America.”

“Ah. So you left there.”

“Yes. South gate in a cave, opens way down Phumchu. Then downvalley to Darjeeling.”

“Does anyone go through that hidden valley anymore?”

“They go through without seeing. Too busy!” A gravelly chuckle. “Buddhafield not always visible. In this case, Dorje Phakmo, the Adamantine Sow, lies along that valley.”

“A pig?”

“Subtle body, hard to find.”

Another time, because of that:

“So animals are kind of magical too?”

“Of course. Obvious when you see them, right?”

“True,” Frank said. He told Rudra about his activities with FOG, including the arrival in Rock Creek Park of the aurochs.

“Very good!” Rudra exclaimed. “I liked them.”

“Uh huhn. What about tigers?”

“Oh, I like them too. Very good animal. Scary, but good. They have scary masks, but really they are friendly helpers. At power places they are tame.”

“Tame?”

“Tame. Friendly, helpful, courteous.”

“Kind, obedient, cheerful, brave, clean, and reverent?”

“Yes. All those.”

“Hmm.”

Another time, Frank read a passage on his screen and said, “Rudra, are you the Rudra Cakrin, the one people write about?”

“No.”

“You’re not? There’s more than one?”

“Yes. He is very old.”

“Sixteen thousand years before the birth of Christ, it says here.”

“Yes, very old. I am not that old.” Gurgle. “Almost, but not.”

“So are you some kind of boddhisattva?”

“No no. Not so good as that, no.”

“But you are a lama, or what say, a tulku or what have you?”

“What have you, I guess you say. I am a voice.”

“A voice?”

“You know. Vehicle for voice. Spirits seem to speak through me.”

“Like in those ceremonies, you get taken over and say things?”

“Yes.”

“That looks like it must hurt.”

“Yes, it seems so. I don’t remember what happens then. But afterward I often seem to be sore.”

“Does it still happen?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you scheduled for a ceremony anytime soon?”

“No. You know—retired.”

“Retired?”

“Is that not word? What say, get old, give up work?”

“Yes, that’s retirement. I just didn’t know that your kind of job allowed for retirement.”

“Of course. Very hard job.”

“I imagine so.”

Frank googled “oracle, Tibetan Buddhist,” and read randomly for a while. It was pretty alarming stuff. What always got him was how elaborated everything was in Tibetan Buddhism; it was not a simple thing, like he imagined American Protestant churches being, with their simple creeds: I believe in God, an abstract or maybe a human image, with some vague tripartite divisions and a relatively straightforward story about a single visit to Earth. Not at all; instead, a vastly articulated system of gods and spirits, with complicated histories and interactions, and ongoing appearances in this world. The oracles when possessed would grow taller, lift enormously heavy costumes, cause medallions on their chest to bounce outward under the force of their elevated heartbeat. If certain powerful spirits entered the oracle, he had less than five minutes to live. Blood would gush from nose and mouth, body go completely rigid.

Maybe this was all a matter of adrenalin and endorphins. Maybe this was what the body was capable of when the mind was convinced of something. Oxytocined by the cosmic spirit. But in any case they were quite serious about it; to them it was real. “The system is so complex and multilayered that it operates with some degree of freedom.” The mind, ordering the incoming data one way or another; different realities, perhaps. And what if they were evaluated on the basis of how they made one feel? On that basis there was certainly no justification to condescend to these people, no matter what strange things they said. They were in far better control of their feelings than Frank was.

Through all of March the winter stayed as cold and windy as ever. Twelve days in a row record lows were set, and on March 23rd it was twenty below at noon. Frank worried that any trees that had survived the worst of the winter would have their blooms killed in the frigid spring; and then where would they be? What would the East Coast be like if its great hardwood forest died? Would whole biomes collapse as a result, would agriculture itself be substantially destroyed? How would Europe feed itself? What might happen to Asia’s already shaky food security? It seemed to him sometimes that a winter this severe might change things for good.

In this context the campaign for the presidential election coming up in the fall looked more trivial than ever. Phil Chase wrapped up the Democratic nomination, the president’s team upped the firepower of their attacks on him; the SSEEP virtual candidate caused trouble for everybody who came in contact with it. Frank couldn’t be bothered, and it seemed there were others like him out there. The long winter came first in the news and in people’s thoughts.

Halfway through April the increasing length of the days became impossible to miss. Spring was here, snow or not. Daylight savings time came, and even though the mornings were darker at first, that did not last long. By the first of May there was so much more light that there simply had to be more heat; and then one day without warning it hit eighty degrees, and everyone and everything sweltered. The whole world steamed, thawed branches drooped and hung, thawed pipes leaked, wires shorted, mold grew. It was like a permafrost melt in the tundra, with pingos and polygonal cracking and fields of new mud, and the air stifling. Mosquitoes came back, and everyone began to wonder if the hard winter had really been that bad after all.

When Frank visited Rock Creek he found Cutter on Connecticut again, using his old orange cones and orange tape to clear space around a tree canted at a forty-five-degree angle.

“How’s it going?”

“Pretty good! Spring has sprung!”

“Did the trees live?”

“Most of them yeah. Lot of dead branches. It’ll make for a busy summer. I swear the forest gonna take over this city.”

“I bet. Can I join you sometime?”

“Sure you can. Do you own a chainsaw?”

“No, can’t say I do.”

“That’s all right. There’s other help you can do.”

“I can always drag wood away.”

“Exactly.”

“So where do you take the wood if you’re doing something like this on your own?”

“Oh all kinds of places. I take it to a friend’s and we cut it up for firewood.”

“And that’s okay?”

“Oh sure. There’s an awful lot of trees need trimming. Lot of it being done by freelancers. The city need help, and the wood can be the pay.”

“It sounds like it works pretty well.”

“Well…” Cutter laughed.

“Hey, did you ever find out anything more about Chessman?”

“No, not really. I asked Byron but he didn’t know. He said he thought maybe he moved. There was a chess tournament up in New York he said Chessman talked about.”

“He said something about playing in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did Byron know his name?”

“He said he thought his name was Clifford.”

All the branches sprouted green buds. Tiny buds of a vivid light green, a color Frank had never seen before, a color that glowed on cloudy days, and sparked in his peripheral vision like fireflies. Green buds on a wet black bough, life coming back to the forest. It could not have been more beautiful. No moment in the Mediterranean climate could ever match this moment of impossible green.

He started going over to the park again, while at the same time he felt less anxious about living at the embassy house.

And yet he never returned to feeling quite himself. His face was still numb, inside his nose and right below it, and behind it. When he was shaving he saw that the numb part of his upper lip looked inert, and thus to himself he seemed deformed. He could not smile properly. He didn’t know how he felt about that. He supposed that the effect for others was slight, and that if noticed at all people did not talk about it, out of politeness.

The bros did not worry about that kind of thing. “Hey Jimmy! Jimmy Durante! How’s it hanging, did your dick survive its frostbite? That scared ya didn’t it! Did your nose heal straight? Can you breathe through it anymore?”

“No.”

“HA ha ha. Hey Mouthbreather! I knew you wouldn’t be able to the first time I saw it.”

“So who were those guys anyway?” Frank asked again.

“Who the fuck knows? We never saw them again.”

“Lucky for you.”

“No lie.”

“You guys could use a phone. Whip it out and 911 in situations like that.”

“Yeah right!”

“So that being the case, I brought you all application cards so you can get into FOG, the zoo group.”

“No way.”

“They tell me the park is going to he regulated this summer, so you’ll need to be a member to be able to stay in the park.”

“You think the cops will act any different just because we got some card on us?”

“Yes, I do. Plus, they give you a cell phone if you’re a member. It’s a little party line, but it works.”

“Oh good I always wanted one of those!”

“Shut up and fill out the form here. Come on—I bet you can put down any name you want. Besides, it can’t possibly break any parole agreements. They’re not going to throw you in jail for joining the Friends of the National Zoo for God’s sake.”

“Ha ha! Who you saying is on parole?”

“Yeah who you saying is on parole? At least we got noses”

“Ha ha. Just fill out the form.”

Coming up to their little closet, Frank heard someone in there talking to Rudra, and came up to the door curious to see who it was, as the old man seemed somewhat neglected in the house. But no one else was in there. Rudra started at the sight of Frank, stared up at him with an addled look, as if he had forgotten who Frank was.

“Sorry,” Frank said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I am happy you did.”

“Talking to yourself, were you?”

“Don’t think so.”

“I thought I heard somebody.”

“Interesting. Sometimes I, what say … I sing to myself. One kind of Tibetan singing makes two sounds from one voice. Head note? Overtone?” He opened his mouth and emitted a bass note lower than Frank would have expected from such a slight body; and at the same time there was a scratchy harmonic floating in the room.

“Very nice,” Frank said. “It reminds me of Louis Armstrong.”

Rudra nodded. “Very fine singer.” He opened his mouth again, sang deeply, “The odds, were a hundred to one against us,” like Louis played at two-thirds normal speed, slower and deeper.

“That’s right, very good! So you like him?”

“Very fine singer. Head tone undeveloped, but very strong.”

“Interesting.” Frank unrolled his groundpad, laid himself out with a small groan.

“Go to park?”

“Yes.”

“Find your friends?”

“Some of them.” Frank began to describe them and the situation out there—the bros, the fregans, his own project. He lay down on his back and left the laptop off, and talked about the paleolithic, and how the brain had evolved to feel good because of certain stimuli caused by behaviors performed repeatedly in the two-million-year run-up to humanity; and how they should be able to feel good now by living a life that conformed as closely to these early behaviors as possible. Which was what he had been trying to do, in his life out in the park.

“Good idea!” Rudra said. “Original mind. This is Buddhism also.”

“Yes? Well, I guess I’m not surprised. It seemed to me that you were talking about something like that when you spoke at NSF last year.”

Rudra didn’t appear to remember this talk, which had been such a shattering experience for Frank—a real paradigm buster, as Edgardo would say. Frank did not press the matter, feeling shy at admitting to the old man what a profound effect he had created, with what had apparently been an offhand comment. Instead he described to Rudra the ways in which he felt that prisoner’s dilemma and Snowdrift modeled ethics in a scientific way, how the games were scored and the strategies judged, and how, at the start of the winter, he had come to the tentative conclusion that it made best adaptive sense to pursue the strategy called always generous.

“Good idea,” Rudra said. “But what are these points? Why play for points?”

Frank was still pondering this when Sucandra and Padma clomped upstairs to see how the old man was doing. “Cookies,” Sucandra said, holding out a plate. “Fresh out of the oven.”

He and Padma sat on the floor in the doorway, and the four of them ate sugar cookies like kids at a sleepover.

“These are good,” Frank said. “I’ve been getting so hungry this winter.”

“Oh yes,” Sucandra said. “You get much hungrier in the cold.”

“And much colder when you’re hungry,” Padma added.

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “We learned that both ways, didn’t we?”

“Yes.”

Frank looked at them. “The Chinese?”

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “In their prison.”

“How long?”

“Ten years.”

Frank shook his head, trying to imagine this and failing. “How much did you get to eat?”

“A bowl of rice a day.”

“Did people starve?” Frank said, looking at the remaining cookies on the plate.

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “Died from hunger, died from cold.”

Padma nodded. “Others survived, but lost their wits.”

“Maybe we all did.”

“Yes, no doubt.”

“But I know who you mean when you say that. We had this old monk, you see, who was shitting some kind of tapeworm. Long red thing, segmented. Like millipede without legs. We knew this because he cleaned them up when it happened, and brought them to the group to offer them to the rest of us as food.”

“He claimed Bon spirit was inside him making food for us.”

Frank said, “So what did you do?”

“We chopped the worms up very fine and added them to the rice.”

“No doubt it added some protein to our diet.”

“Not much, it was more a gesture.”

“But anything helped at that point.”

“It’s true. I kind of got to looking forward to it.”

They grinned at each other, looked shyly at Frank.

“Yes. It helped us feel like we were together. People need to be part of a group.”

“And to help the old monk. He would get very distraught.”

“But then he died.”

“Yes, that’s right. But then the rice seemed to be missing something!”

One morning when it was spring and all, cool and green and sweet, like some May day remembered from a distant past that they had assumed would never come again, Charlie drove out to Great Falls and met Frank and Drepung. Frank was going to teach them the basics of rock climbing.

Anna did not thoroughly approve, but Frank assured her he would make it safe, and her risk-assessment realism impelled her to concede it was probably all right. Charlie, only momentarily disappointed that he had lost this best excuse to back out of it, now parked next to the other two, and they walked out the short trail to the gorge, carrying two backpacks of Frank’s gear and a few tight loops of nylon rope. After coming to an overlook, the trail paralleled the clifftop, and they followed it to a spot under a prominent tree, which Frank declared was the top of a good teaching route.

It was a new route, he said, for the great flood had greatly rearranged Great Falls, tearing new routes all up and down the south wall. When that much water ran over rock it tore at it not only by direct friction but also by a process called cavitation, in which the water broke into bubbles that were in effect vacuums that sucked violently at the cracks in the rocks, cracking them further, so that big blocks were plucked out rather than worn away. The walls of Mather Gorge had been plucked pretty hard.

Frank uncoiled one length of rope and tied it off around the trunk of the tree. He pointed down the cliff. “See the flat spot down at the bottom? On the right here, you can basically walk down to it, like on stairs. Then you can climb the wall over here, or there. It’s like a climbing wall in a gym.”

The knobby black rock was schist, he said. The gorge was an unusual feature in this region; there was another smaller one on the Susquehanna, but mostly the eastern piedmont lacked this kind of rocky outcropping. It had been cut in discrete bursts, the geologists had found, perhaps in the big floods that punctuated the end of ice ages. Their recent flood was a minor scouring compared to those.

Now they stood on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the river’s white roil and rumble. “There’s almost every kind of hold represented on this wall,” Frank continued. “Conveniently identified for the beginning climber by the fresh new chalk marks you see on them. There’s been lots of action here already. I’ll have you top-belayed the whole time today from this tree here, so even if you slip and come off, you’ll only bounce in place a little. The rope has some flex, so you won’t be brought up short if it happens. I’ll have you jump off on purpose so you know what it feels like.”

Charlie and Drepung exchanged a reassured glance. It was going to be okay. Neither would die as the result of being a bad student, something they both had been a few times in the past.

That being established they became happier, and put on their harnesses cheerfully, indeed prone to sudden bursts of muffled hilarity ostensibly caused by the difficulties of getting their legs in the proper holes. It was pretty lame, and Frank shook his head. Then they were solemnly studying Frank’s knots, and learning the simple but effective suspension belaying systems used by climbers, techniques that held without fail when needed, but also would run freely when desired. Frank was very clear and businesslike in his explanations, and patient with their fumbling and misunderstanding. He had done this before.

When he seemed to feel they had absorbed the necessary minimum, he retied all their knots himself, then ran Charlie’s rope through a carabiner tied to their tree and wrapped it around his waist. Charlie then carefully descended the staircase analog that ran down to a floor just above the river. Standing at the bottom Charlie turned to look up at Frank.

“Okay,” Frank said, pulling the rope between them taut through the carabiner. “On belay.”

“On belay,” Charlie repeated. Then he started climbing, focusing on the wall and seeing it hold by hold. The chalk marks did indeed help. Monkey up, using the knobs and nicks they indicated. He heard Frank’s suggestions as if from a distance. Don’t look down. Don’t try to pull yourself up by the arms. Use the legs as much as possible. Keep three points attached at all times. Move smoothly, never lunge.

His toe slipped and he fell. Boing, fend off wall; bounce gently; he was okay. Relocate holds, get back to climbing. Was that all? Why, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as he had thought it would be! With such a system there wasn’t the slightest danger!

The way Frank failed to agree with this served to refocus Charlie’s attention on the wall.

Some of what Charlie was doing was familiar to him already, as it resembled the scrambling he had done on backpacking trips in the Sierra. The steps, grabs, and motions were the same, but here he was performing them on a surface drastically more vertical than any he and his backpacking friends would have attempted. Indeed if he had ever wandered onto such a face during a scramble in the Sierra, he would have been paralyzed with fear.

But being top-roped really did remove the source of that fear, and with it gone, there was room to notice other feelings. The action felt like a kind of acrobatics, unrehearsed and in slow motion. Charlie became absorbed in it for a long time, slowing down as the holds seemed scarcer, until his fingers began to hurt. For a while nothing existed except for the rock face and his search for holds. Once or twice Frank spoke, but mostly he watched. The tug of his belay, while reassuring, did not actually pull Charlie up; and now he began to struggle, with only a final awkward lunge getting him up to the rim.

Very absorbing stuff! And now a surge of some kind of I’M STILL ALIVE glow was flowing through his whole body. He saw how it was that people might get hooked.

Then it was Drepung’s turn. Charlie sat with his feet swinging over the edge, watching happily. From above Drepung looked bulky, and his expression as he searched the rock face was uncomfortable. Charlie had his years of scrambling experience; Drepung did not. After hauling himself up the first few holds he looked down once between his feet, and after that he seemed a bit glued to the rock. He muttered something about a traditional Tibetan fear of falling, but Frank would have none of it. “That’s a tradition everywhere, I assure you. Just focus on where you’re at, and feel the belay. Jump off if you want to see how it’ll feel.”

“It seems I will get to find out soon enough anyway.”

He was slow, but he kept trying. His moves were pretty sure when they happened. His small mouth pursed in a perfect little O of concentration. In a few minutes more he made it up and hauled himself around to sit beside Charlie, uttering a happy “Ha.”

Frank had them do it again, trying other routes on the face; then they belayed each other, nervously, with Frank standing beside the belayer making sure all was well. Lastly he had them rappel down, in a simple but scary operation like the old Batman, but for real. They practiced until their hands got too tired and sore to hold on to anything.

After that (it had taken a couple of hours) Frank changed his belay to another tree on the cliff top. “It looks like both Juliet’s Balcony and Romeo’s Ladder survived. I’m going to do one of those, or Gorky Park.” He dropped away, leaving Charlie and Drepung sitting happily on the cliff’s edge, kicking their heels against the rock and taking in the view. To their left the rearranged falls roared down its drops, every step along the way boiling whitely. Below them Frank was climbing slowly.

Suddenly Charlie leaped to his feet shouting: “Where’s Joe!” and looking around them desperately.

“Not here,” Drepung reminded him. “With Anna today, remember?”

“Oh yeah.” Charlie sank back down. “Sorry. For a second there I forgot.”

“That’s okay. You must be used to watching him all the time.”

“Yes.”

He sat back on the cliff’s edge, shaking his head. Slowly Frank ascended toward them. As he looked up for his next hold his face reminded Charlie of Buster Keaton; he had that same wary and slightly baffled look, ready for anything—unflappable, although not imperturbable, as his eyes revealed just as clearly as Keaton’s that in fact he was perturbed most of the time.

Charlie had always had a lot of sympathy for Buster Keaton. Life as a string of astonishing crises to be dealt with; it seemed right to him. He said, “Drepung?”

“Yes?”

Charlie inspected his torn hand. Drepung held his own hand next to it; both were chewed up by the day’s action.

“Speaking of Joe.”

“Yes?”

Charlie heaved a sigh. He could feel the worry that had built up in him. “I don’t want him to be any kind of special person for you guys.”

“What?”

“I don’t want him to be a reincarnated soul.”

“… Buddhism says we are all such.”

“I don’t want him to be any kind of reincarnated lama. Not a tulku, or a boddhisattva, or whatever else you call it. Not someone your people would have any religious interest in at all.”

Drepung inspected his palm. The skin was about the same color as Charlie’s, maybe more opaque. Let that stand for us, Charlie thought. At least as far as Charlie’s sight was concerned. He couldn’t tell what Drepung was flunking. Except it did seem that the young man didn’t know what to say.

This tended to confirm Charlie’s suspicions. He said, “You know what happened to the new Panchen Lama.”

“Yes. I mean no, not really.”

“Because nobody does! Because they picked a little boy and the Chinese took him and he has never been seen again. Two little boys, in fact.”

Drepung nodded, looking upset. “That was a mess.”

“Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

Drepung grimaced. “The Panchen Lama is the reincarnation of the Buddha Amitabha. He is the second most important spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism, and his relationship with the Dalai Lama has always been complicated. The two were often at odds, but they also helped to choose each other’s successors. Then in the last couple of centuries the Panchen Lama has often been associated with Chinese interests, so it got even more complicated.”

“Sure,” Charlie said.

“So, when the tenth Panchen Lama died, in 1989, the identification of his next reincarnation was obviously a problem. Who would make the determination? The Chinese government told the Panchen Lama’s monastery, Tashilhunpo, to find the new reincarnation. So, that was proper, but they also made it clear they would have final approval of the choice made.”

“On what basis?”

“Well, you know. To control the situation.”

“Ah yes. Of course.”

“So Chadrel Rimpoche, the head of the Tashilhunpo Monastery, contacted the Dalai Lama in secret, to get his help in making the choice, as was proper in the tradition. His group had already identified several children in north Tibet as possibilities. So the Dalai Lama performed divinations to discover which of them was the new Panchen Lama. He found that it was a boy living near Tashilhunpo. The signs were clear. But now the question was, how were they going to get that candidate approved by the Chinese, while also hiding the involvement of the Dalai Lama.”

“Couldn’t Chadrel Rimpoche just tell the Chinese that’s who it was?”

“Well, but the Chinese had introduced a system of their own. It involves a thing called the Golden Urn. When there are any uncertainties, and those are easy to create, then the three top names are put into this urn. The name drawn from the urn is destined to be the correct one.”

“What?” Charlie cried. “They draw the name out of a hat?”

“Out of an urn. Yes.”

“But that’s crazy! I mean presumably if there is a reincarnated lama in one of these kids, he is who he is! You can’t be drawing a name from a hat.”

“One would suppose. But the Chinese have never been averse to harming Tibetan traditions, as you know. Anyway, in this case the Dalai Lama’s divination was a boy in a region under Chinese control, so it seemed as if chances for his confirmation were fairly good. But there was concern that the Chinese would use the urn to deliberately choose someone other than the one Chadrel Rimpoche recommended, just to show they were in control, and to deny the Dalai Lama any possible influence.”

“Sure. And so?”

“And so, the Dalai Lama eventually decided to announce the identity of the boy, thinking that the Chinese would then be pressured to conform to Tibetan wishes, but satisfied that it was a boy living under their control.”

“Oh no,” Charlie said. “I’m surprised anyone could have thought that, knowing the Chinese.”

Drepung sighed. “It was a gamble. The Dalai Lama must have felt that it was the best chance they had.”

“But it didn’t work.”

“No.”

“So what happened to the boy?”

“He and his parents were taken into custody. Chadrel Rimpoche also.”

“Where are they now?”

“No one knows. They have not been seen since that time.”

“Now see? I don’t want Joe to be any part of that sort of thing!”

Drepung sighed. Finally he said, “The Panchen Lama is a special case, very highly politicized, because of the Chinese. Many returned lamas are identified without any such problems.”

“I don’t care! Besides, you can’t be sure whether it will get complicated or not.”

“No Chinese are involved.”

“I don’t care!”

Drepung hunched forward a little, as if to say, What can I do, I can’t do anything.

“Look,” Charlie said. “It’s upsetting Anna. She doesn’t believe in anything you can’t see or quantify, you know that. It upsets her even to try. You make this kind of stuff be about Joe and it will just freak her out. She’s trying not to think about it right now, I can tell, but even that is freaking her out. She’s not good at not thinking about things. She thinks about things.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be. I mean, think of it this way. If she hadn’t befriended you guys like she did when you first came here, then you would never even have known Joe existed. So in effect you are punishing Anna for her kindness to you.”

Drepung pursed his lips, hummed unhappily. He looked like he had while climbing: unhappy, faced with a problem.

“Besides,” Charlie pressed, “the whole idea that your kid is somehow not just, you know, your kid—that he’s someone else somehow—that in itself is upsetting. Offensive, one might even say. I mean he is a reincarnation already, of me and Anna.”

“And your ancestors.”

“Right, true. But anyone else, no.”

“Hmmm.”

“But you see what I mean? How it feels?”

“Yes.” Drepung nodded, rocking his whole body forward and back. “Yes, I do.”

They sat there, looking down at the river. A lone kayaker was working her way upstream against the white flow. Below them Frank, who was standing by the shore again, was staring out at her.

Charlie gestured down at Frank. “He seems interested.”

“Indeed he does.”

They watched Frank watch her.

“So,” Charlie persevered, “maybe you could talk to Rudra Cakrin about this matter for me. See if he can do something, see if there is some kind of, I don’t know, exorcism he can do. Not that I mean to imply anything, just some kind of I don’t know. Re-individuation ceremony. To clear him out, and well—leave him alone. Are there such ceremonies?”

“Well… in a manner of speaking, yes. I suppose.”

“So will you talk to Rudra about doing it? Maybe just without much fanfare, so Anna doesn’t know about it?”

Drepung was frowning. “If she doesn’t know, then …”

“Then it would be for me. Yes. For me and Joe. And then it would get to Anna, by way of us. Why, does it have to be public?”

“No no. It’s not that.”

“What—you don’t want to talk to Rudra about it?”

“Well … Rudra would not actually be the one to decide about such a matter.”

“No?” Charlie was surprised. “Who then? Someone back in Khembalung, or Tibet?”

Drepung shook his head.

“Well, who then?”

Drepung lifted his hand as if to inspect it again. He pointed the bloodied thumb at himself. Looked at Charlie.

Charlie shifted on the ground to get a better look back at him. “What, you?”

Drepung nodded with his body again.

Charlie laughed shortly. All of a sudden many things were becoming clear. “Why you rascal you!” He gave the young man a light shove. “You guys have been running a scam on us the whole time.”

“No no. Not a scam.”

“So what is Rudra then, some kind of servant, some old retainer you’re doing a prince-and-pauper switch with?”

“No, not at all. He is a tulku too. But not so, that is to say, in the Khembali order there are also relationships between tulkus, like the ones between the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.”

“So you’re the boss, you’re saying.”

Drepung winced. “Well. I am the one the others regard as their, you know. Leader.”

“Spiritual leader? Political leader?”

Drepung wiggled a hand.

“What about Padma and Sucandra?”

“They are in effect like regents, or they were. Like brothers now, advisors. They tell me so much, they are like my teachers. Brothers really.”

“I see. And so you stay behind the scenes here.”

“Or, in front of the scenes really. The greeter.”

“Both in front and behind.”

“Yes.”

“Very clever. It’s just what I thought all along.”

“Really?”

“No. I thought Rudra spoke English.”

Drepung nodded. “His English is not so bad. He has been studying. Though he does not like to admit it.”

“But listen, Drepung—you do these kinds of switches and cover stories and all, because you know it’s a little dangerous out there, right? Because of the Chinese and all?”

Drepung pursed his lips. “Well, not so much for that—”

“And think about it like this—you know what it means to suddenly be called someone else! You must.”

At this Drepung blinked. “Yes. It’s true. I remember my parents… My father was really happy for me. For all of us, really proud. But my mother was never really reconciled. She would put my hand on her and say, ‘You came from here. You came from here.’ ”

“What do they think now?”

“They are no longer in those bodies.”

“Ah.” He seemed young to have lost both parents. But who knew what they had lived through. Charlie said, “Anyway, you know what I’m talking about.”

“Yes.”

For a long time they sat in the misty rumble of the great falls, looking down at Frank, who had now unclipped from his rope, and was walking over the jumbled rocks by the water, attempting, it appeared, to keep the kayaker in sight as she approached the foot of the falls proper.

Charlie pressed on. “Will you do something about this then?”

Drepung rocked again. Charlie was beginning to wonder if it signaled assent or not. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Now don’t you be giving me that!”

“What? Oh! Oh, no, no, I meant it for real!”

They both laughed, thinking about Phil Chase and his I’ll see what I can dos. “They all say it,” Charlie complained.

“Now, now. They are seeing what they can do. You must give them that.”

“I don’t give them that. They’re seeing what they can’t do.”

Drepung waggled a hand, smiling. He too had had to put people off, Charlie saw.

They leaned out to try and spot Frank.

As they peered down, Charlie found that he felt better. Talking with someone else about this matter had eased the sense of isolation that had been oppressing him. He wasn’t used to having something he couldn’t talk to Anna about, and without her, he had been at a loss.

And the news that Drepung was the true power in Khembali affairs, once he got over it, was actually quite reassuring. Rudra Cakrin, when all was said and done, was a strange old man. It was far better to have someone he knew and trusted in charge of this business.

“I’ll talk to Rudra Cakrin about it,” Drepung said.

“I thought you said he was a front man.”

“No no. A … a colleague. I need to consult with him, for sure. For one thing he would probably conduct the ceremony. He is the oracle. But that also means he will know what ceremonies I refer to. There are some precedents. Certain accidents, mistakes rectified … there are some things I can look into.”

Charlie nodded. “Good. You remember what I said about Anna welcoming you to NSF.”

“Yes.” Drepung grimaced. “Actually, it was the oracle who told us to take that office.”

“Come on, what, he said ‘Move to 4201 Wilson Boulevard?’ ”

“Not exactly.”

“No I guess not! Well, whatever. Just remember how Anna feels about it. It’s probably very much like your mom felt.”

Charlie was surprised to hear himself going for the jugular like that. Then he thought of Joe clutching at him, frightened and pitiful, and his mouth clenched. He wanted all this business cleared away. The fever would follow.

They watched the river roil by. White patches on black water.

“Look—it looks like Frank is trying to catch that kayaker’s attention.”

“It sure does.”

The woman was now resting, paddle flat across the kayak in front of her, gliding downstream. Frank was hurrying downstream to stay abreast of her, stumbling once or twice on the rocky bank, hands to his mouth to cup shouts out to her. He started waving his arms up and down. He came to a flatter patch and ran to get ahead of her. He semaphored with his arms, megaphoned with his hands, jumped up and down.

“He must know that person?”

“Or something. But she must be hearing him, don’t you think?”

“It seems like it. Seeing him too, for that matter. She must not want to be interrupted.”

“I guess.”

It was hard to see how she couldn’t be noticing him; which meant she must be ignoring him on purpose. She floated on, and he continued to chase her, scrambling over boulders now, shouting still.

She never turned her head. A big boulder blocked Frank’s way and he slipped, went to his knees, held out his arms; but now she was past him, and did not look back.

Finally his arms fell. Head bowed, shoulders slumped—the very figure of a man whose hopes have been dashed.

Charlie and Drepung looked at each other.

“Do you think that Frank is seeming kind of…”

“Yes.”