Sixty Days and Counting

-

Phil Chase was a man with a past. He was one of Congress’s Vietnam vets, and that was by and large a pretty rambunctious crowd. They had license to be a little crazy, and not all of them took it, but it was there if they wanted it.

Phil had wanted it. He had always played that card to the hilt. Unconventional, unpredictable, devil-may-care, friend of McCain. And for well over a decade, his particular shtick had been to be the World’s Senator, phoning in his work or jetting into D.C. at the last hour to make votes he had to make in person. All this had been laid before the people of California as an explicit policy, with the invitation to vote him out of office if they did not like it. But they did. Like a lot of California politicians who had jumped onto the national stage, his support at home was strong. High negatives, sure, but high positives, with the positives outrunning the negatives by about two to one. Now that he was president, the numbers had only polarized more, in the usual way of American politics, everyone hooked on the soap opera of cheering for or against personalities.

So a checkered past was a huge advantage in creating the spectacle. In his particular version of the clichéd list, Phil had been a reporter for the L.A. Times, a surfboard wax manufacturer (which business had bankrolled the start of his political career), a VA social worker, a college lecturer in history, a sandal maker, and an apprentice to a stonemason. From that job he had run for Congress from Marin County, and won the seat as an outsider Democrat. This was a difficult thing to do. The Democratic Party hated outsiders to join the party and win high office at the first try; they wanted everyone to start at the bottom of the ladder and work their way up until thoroughly brainwashed and obliged.

Worse yet, Phil had then jumped into a weak Senatorial race, and ridden the state’s solid Democratic majority into the Senate, even though the party was still offended and not behind him.

Soon after that, his wife of twenty-three years, his high-school sweetheart, who had served in Vietnam as a nurse to be closer to him after he was drafted, died in a car crash. It was after that that Phil had started his globe-trotting, turning into the World’s Senator. Because he kept his distance from D.C. through all those years, no one in the capital knew much about his personal life. What they knew was what he gave them. From his account it was all travel, golf, and meetings with foreign politicians, often the environmental ministers, often in central Asia. “I like the Stans,” he would say.

In his frequent returns to California, he was much the same. For a while he pursued his “Ongoing Work Education program,” Project OWE, because he owed it to his constituents to learn what their lives were like. Pronounced ow, however, by his staff, because of the injuries he incurred while taking on various jobs around the state for a month or three, working at them while continuing to function as senator in D.C., which irritated his colleagues no end. In that phase, he had worked as a grocery store bagger and checkout clerk, construction worker, real estate agent, plumber (or plumber’s helper as he joked), barrio textile seamstress, sewage maintenance worker, trash collector, stockbroker, and a celebrated stint as a panhandler in San Francisco, during which time he had slept at undisclosed locations in Golden Gate Park and elsewhere around the city, and asked for spare change for his political fund—part of his “spare change” effort in which he had also asked California citizens to send in all the coins accumulating on their dressers, a startlingly successful plan that had weighed tons and netted him close to a million dollars, entirely funding his second run for senator, which he did on the cheap and mostly over the internet.

He had also walked from San Francisco to Los Angeles, climbed the Seven Summits (voting on the clean air bill from the top of Mt. Everest), swum from Catalina to the southern California mainland, and across Chesapeake Bay, and hiked the Appalachian trail from end to end. (“Very boring,” was his judgment. “Next time the PCT.”)

All these activities were extraneous to his work in the Senate, and time-consuming, and for his first two terms he was considered within the Beltway to be a celebrity freak, a party trick of a politician and a lightweight in the real world of power (i.e. money) no matter how far he could walk or swim. But even in that period his legislation had been interesting in concept (his contribution) and solidly written (his staff’s contribution), and cleverly pursued and promoted by all, with much more of it being enacted into law than was usual in the Senate. This was not noted by the press, always on the lookout for bad news and ephemera, but by his third term it began to become evident to insiders that he had been playing the insider game all along, and only pretending to be an outsider, so that his committee appointments were strong, and his alliances within the Democratic Party apparatus finally strong, and across the aisle with moderate Republicans and McCain and other Vietnam vets, even stronger. He also had done a good job making his enemies, taking on flamboyantly bad senators like Winston and Reynolds and Hoof-in-mouth, whose subsequent falls from grace on corruption charges or simply failed policies had then retroactively confirmed his early judgments that these people were not just political dunderheads but also dangerous to the republic.

So ultimately, when the time came, everything he had done for twenty years and more turned out to have been as it were designed to prepare him not only for his successful run for the presidency, but for his subsequent occupancy as well, a crucial point and something that many previous candidates obviously forgot. The world travel, the global network of allies and friends, the OWE program, the legislation he had introduced and gotten passed, his committee work—it all fit a pattern, as if he had had the plan from the start.

Which he totally denied, and his staff believed him. They thought in their gossip among themselves that they had seen him come to his decision to run just a year before the campaign (at about the same time, Charlie thought but never said aloud, that he had met for twenty minutes with the Khembali leaders). Whether he had harbored thoughts all along, no one really knew. No one could read his mind, and he had no close associates. Widowed; kids grown; friends kept private and out of town: to Washington he seemed as lonely and impenetrable as Reagan, or FDR, or Lincoln—all friendly and charming people, but distant in some basic way.

In any case he was in, and ready and willing to use the office as strong presidents do—not only as the executive branch of government, whipping on the other two to get things done, but also as a bully pulpit from which to address the citizens of the country and the rest of the world. His high positive/high negative pattern continued and intensified, with the debate over him in the States more polarized than ever, at least in the media. But in the world at large, his positives were higher than any American president’s since Kennedy. And interest was very high. All waited and watched through the few weeks left until his inauguration; there was a sudden feeling of stillness in the world, as if the pendulum swinging them all together helplessly this way and that had reached a height, and paused in space, just before falling the other way. People began to think that something might really happen.

-

IT SEEMED TO FRANK that with such a president as Phil Chase coming into office, in theory it ought to be very interesting to be the Presidential Science Advisor, or an advisor to the advisor. But there were aspects of the new job that were disturbing as well. It was going to mean increasing the distance between himself and the doing of science proper, and was therefore going to move him away from what he was good at. But that was what it meant to be moving into administration. Was there anyone who did policy well?

His intrusion on the Khembalis was another problem. Rudra’s failing health was a problem. His own injury, and the uncertain mentation that had resulted (if it had), was a very central problem—perhaps the problem. Leaving NSF, meaning Anna and the rest of his acquaintances and routines there (except for Edgardo and Kenzo, who were also joining Diane’s team), was a problem.

Problems required solutions, and solutions required decisions. And he couldn’t decide. So the days were proving difficult.

Because above and beyond all the rest of his problems, there was the absolutely immediate one: he had to—had to—warn Caroline that her cover was insufficient to keep even a newcomer on the scene like Edgardo’s friend from locating her. He had to warn her of this! But he did not know where she was. She might be on that island in Maine, but unless he went and looked he couldn’t know. But if he went, he could not do anything that might expose her (and him too) to her husband. His van was chipped with a GPS transponder—Caroline was the one who had told him about it—so its identity and location could be under surveillance, and tracked wherever it went. He could easily imagine a program that would flag any time his van left the metropolitan area. This was a serious disadvantage, because his van was his shelter of last resort, his only mobile bedroom, and all in all, the most versatile room in the disassembled and modular home that he had cast through the fabric of the city.

“Can I dechip my van?” he asked Edgardo next day on their run, after wanding them both again. “For certain? And, you know, as if by accident or malfunction?”

“I should think so,” Edgardo replied. “It might be something you would need some help with. Let me look into it.”

“Okay, but I want to go soon.”

“Up to Maine?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll do my best. The person I want to talk to is not exactly on call. I have to meet them in a context like this one.”

But that night, as Frank was settling down in the garden shed with Rudra, who was already asleep, Qang came out to tell him there was a man there to see him. This caused Frank’s pulse to elevate to a disturbing degree—

But it was Edgardo, and a short man, who said “hello” and after that spoke only to Edgardo, in Spanish. “Umberto here is another porteño,” Edgardo said. “He helps me with matters such as this.”

Umberto rolled his eyes dramatically. He took Frank’s keys and went at the van as if he owned it, banging around, pulling up carpet from the floor, running various diagnostics through a laptop, complaining to Edgardo all the while. Eventually he opened the hood and after rooting around for a while, unbolted a small box from the crowded left engine wall. When he was done he gave the box to Frank and walked off into the dark, still berating Edgardo over his shoulder.

“Thanks!” Frank called after him. Then to Edgardo: “Did I see how he did that, so I can put it back in?” He peered at the engine wall, then the bolts in his hand there with the box, then the holes the bolts had come out of. It looked like a wrench kit would do it. “Okay, but where do I put it now?”

“You must leave it right here where it would be, so that it seems your van is parked here. Then replace it when you return.”

“Out here on the street?”

“Isn’t there a driveway to this house?”

“Yeah, I can leave it there I guess. Buried in this gravel here.”

“There you go.”

“And other than that, I’m clean?”

“That’s what Umberto said. Speaking only of the van, of course.”

“Yeah. I’ve got the wand for my stuff. But is that enough? The van won’t look weird to toll gates for not having the box, or anything like that?”

“No. Not every vehicle has these things yet. So far, the total information society is not yet fully online. When it is, you won’t be able to do stuff like this. You’ll never be able to get off the grid, and if you did it would look so strange it would be worse than being on the grid. Everything will have to be rethought.”

Frank grimaced. “Well, by then I won’t be involved in this kind of stuff. Listen, I think I’m going to take off now and get a few hours of driving in. It’ll take me all of tomorrow to get there as it is.”

“That’s true. Good luck my friend. Remember—no cell-phone calls, no ATMs, no credit cards. Do you have enough cash with you?”

“I hope so,” feeling the thickness of his wallet.

“You shouldn’t stay away too long anyway.”

“No. I guess I’m okay, then. Thanks for the help.”

“Good luck. Don’t call.”

Grumpily Frank got in his van and drove north on 95. Transponders embedded in every vehicle’s windshields…except would that really happen? Was this total information project not perhaps crazy enough to fail, ultimately? Or—could it be stopped? Could they go to Phil Chase and lay out the whole story, and get him to root out Caroline’s ex and his whole operation, whatever it was? Root it out from the top down? Were the spy agencies so imbricated into the fabric of the government (and the military) that they were beyond presidential control, or even presidential knowledge? Or inquiry?

If it weren’t for his going-off-grid status, he would have called up Edgardo to ask his opinion on this. As it was he could only continue to think, and worry, and drive.

Somewhere in New Jersey it occurred to him that as he was on the road north, he must therefore have decided to go. He had decided something! And without even trying. Maybe decisions now had to occur without one really noticing them happening, or wondering how. It was so hard to say. In this particular case, he really had had no choice; he had to warn her. So it had been more of a life override than a decision. Maybe one went through life doing the things one had to do, hooped by necessity, with decisions reserved for options and therefore not really a major factor in one’s life. A bad thought or a good one? He couldn’t tell.

A bad thought, he decided in the end. A bad thought in a long night of bad thoughts, as it turned out. Long past midnight he kept following the taillights ahead of him, and the traffic slowly thinned and became mostly trucks of various kinds. Over the Susquehanna, over the Hudson, otherwise tunneling on endlessly through the forest.

Finally he felt in danger of falling asleep at the wheel, got off and found a side road and a little parking lot, empty and dark and anonymous, where he felt comfortable parking under a tree and locking the doors and crawling into the back of the van to catch a few hours’ sleep.

Dawn’s light woke him and he drove on, north through New England, fueled by the worst 7-Eleven coffee he had ever tasted—coffee so bad it was good, in terms of waking him up. The idea that it might be poisoned gave him an extra jolt. Surely someone had poured in their battery acid as a prank. There was too much time to think. If Caroline was the boss, and her ex worked for her, then….

95 kept on coming, an endless slot through endless forest, a grass sward and two concrete strips rolling on for mile after mile. Finally he came to Bangor, Maine, and turned right, driving over hills and across small rivers, then through the standard array of franchises in Ellsworth, including an immense Wal-Mart. During the night he had driven north into full winter; a thin blanket of dirty snow covered everything. He passed a completely shut-down tourist zone, the motels, lobster shacks, antique stores, and miniature golf courses all looking miserable under their load of ice and snow, all except the Christmas knickknack barn, which had a full parking lot and was bustling with festive shoppers.

Soon after that he crossed the bridge that spanned the tidal race to Mount Desert Island. By then the round gray tops of the island’s little range of peaks had appeared several times over the water of Frenchman’s Bay. They were lower than Frank had expected them to be, but still, they were bare rock mountain tops, shaved into graceful curves by the immense force of the Ice Age’s ice cap. Frank had googled the island on a cybercafe’s rented computer, and had read quite a bit; and the information had surprised him in more ways than one. It turned out that this little island was in many ways the place where the American wilderness movement had begun, in the form of the landscape painter Frederick Church, who had come here in the 1840s to paint. In getting around the island, Church had invented what he called “rusticating,” by which he meant wandering on mountainsides just for the fun of it. He also took offense at the clear-cut logging on the island, and worked to get the legislature of Maine to forbid it, in some of the nation’s first environmental legislation. All this was happening at the same time Emerson and Thoreau were writing. Something had been in the air.

Eventually all that led to the national park system, and Mount Desert Island had been the third one, the first east of the Mississippi, and the only one anywhere created by citizens donating their own land. Acadia National Park now took up about two-thirds of the island, in a patchwork pattern; when Frank drove over the bridge he was on private land, but most of the seaward part of the island belonged to the park.

He slowed down, deep in forest still, following instructions printed out from a map website. The Maine coast here faced almost south. The island was roughly square, and split nearly in half, east and west, by a fjord called Somes Sound. Caroline’s friend’s house was on the western half of the island.

Nervously Frank drove through Somesville, at the head of the sound. This turned out to be no more than a scattering of white houses, on snowy lawns on either side of the road. He looked for something like a village commercial center but did not find one.

Now he was getting quite nervous. Just the idea of seeing her. He didn’t know how to approach her. In his uncertainty he drove past the right turn that headed to her friend’s place, and continued on to a town called Southwest Harbor. He wanted to eat something, also to think things over.

In the only cafe still open he ordered a sandwich and espresso. He didn’t want to catch her unawares; that could be a bad shock. On the other hand there didn’t seem any other way to do it. Sitting in the cafe drinking espresso (heavenly after the battery acid), he ate his sandwich and tried to think. They were the same thoughts he had been thinking the whole drive. He would have to surprise her; hopefully he could immediately explain why he was there—the possible danger she was in—so that she did not jump to the conclusion that he was somehow stalking her. They could talk; he could see what she wanted to do, perhaps even help her move somewhere else, if that’s what she wanted. Although in that case…

Well, but he had run through all these thoughts a thousand times during the drive. All the scenarios led to a break point beyond which it was hard to imagine. He had to go to work on Monday. Or he should. And so…

He finished his lunch and walked around a little. Southwest Harbor’s harbor was a small bay surrounded by forested hills, and filled with working boats and working docks, also a small Coast Guard station out on the point to the left. It was quiet, icy, empty of people: picturesque, but in a good way. A working harbor.

He would have to risk dropping in on her. The wand said he was clean. Edgardo’s friend had said his van was clean. He had driven all night, he was five miles away from her. Surely the decision had already been made!

So he got back in his van, and drove back up the road, then took a left and followed a winding road through bare trees. Past an iced-over pond on the right, then another one on the left, this one a lake that was narrow and long, extending south for miles, a white flatness at the bottom of a classic U-shaped glacial slot. Soon after that, a left turn onto a gravel road.

He drove slower than ever, under a dense network of overarching branches. Houses to the left were fronting the long frozen lake. Caroline’s friend’s place was on the right, where it would overlook a second arm of the lake. The map showed a Y-shaped lake, with the long arm straight, and the other shorter arm curving into it about halfway down.

Her friend’s house had no number in its driveway, but by the numbers before and after it, he deduced that it had to be the one. He turned around in a driveway, idled back up the road.

The place had a short gravel curve of driveway, with no cars in it. At the end of the driveway to the left stood a house, while to the right was a detached garage. Both were dark green with white trim. A car could have been hidden in the garage. Ah; the house number was there on the side of the garage.

He didn’t want to drive into the driveway. On the other hand it must look odd, him idling out on the road, looking in—if there was anyone there to see. He idled down the road farther, back in the direction of the paved road. Then he parked on the side at a wide spot, cursing under his breath. He got out and walked quickly down the road and up the driveway to the house in question.

He stopped between the house and the garage, under a big bare-limbed tree. The snow was crushed down to ice shards on the flagstones between the house and garage, as if someone had walked all over them and then there had been a thaw. No one was visible through the kitchen window. He was afraid to knock on the kitchen door. He stepped around the side of the house, looking in the windows running down that side. Inside was a big room, beyond it a sun porch facing the lake. The lake was down a slope from the house. There was a narrow path down, flanked by stone-walled terraces filled with snow and black weeds. Down on the water at the bottom of the path was a little white dock, anchored by a tiny white boathouse.

The door of the boathouse swung open from inside.

“Caroline?” Frank called down.

Silence. Then: “Frank?”

She peeked around the edge of the little boathouse, looking up for him with just the startled unhappy expression he had feared he would cause—

Then she almost ran up the path. “Frank, what is it?” she exclaimed as she hurried up. “What are you doing here?”

He found he was already halfway down the path. They met between two blueberry bushes, him with a hand up as if in warning, but she crashed through that and embraced him—held him—hugged him. They clung to each other.

Frank had not allowed himself to think of this part (but he had anyway): what it meant to hold her. How much he had wanted to see her.

She pushed back from him, looking past him up to the house. “Why are you here? What’s going on? How did you find me?”

“I needed to warn you about that,” Frank said. “At least I thought I should. My friend at NSF, the one who helped me with the election disk you gave us? He has a friend who was looking into who your ex is, and what he’s doing now, you know, because they wanted to follow up on the election thing. So he wanted to talk to you about that, and my friend told him that you had disappeared, and this guy said that he knew where you probably were.”

“Oh my God.” Her hand flew to her mouth. Another body response common to all. She peered around him again up the driveway.

“So, I wanted to see if he was right,” Frank continued, “and I wanted to warn you if he was. And I wanted to see you, anyway.”

“Yes.” They held hands, then hugged again. Squeezed hard. Frank felt the fear and isolation in her.

“So.” He pulled back and looked at her. “Maybe you should move.”

“Yeah. I guess so. Possibly. But—well, first tell me everything you can. Especially about how this person found me. Here, come on up. Let’s get inside.” She led him by the hand, back up the garden path to the house.

She entered it by way of the sun porch door. The sun porch was separated from the living room by diamond-paned windows above a wainscoting. An old vacation home, Frank saw, handmade, scrupulously clean, with old furniture, and paintings on every wall that appeared to be the work of a single enthusiast. The view of the lake seemed the main attraction to Frank.

Caroline gestured around her. “I first visited my friend Mary here when we were six.”

“Man.”

“But we haven’t been in touch for years, and Ed never knew about her. I never told him. In fact, I can’t quite imagine how your friend’s friend tracked down the association.”

“He said you called a number of an old roommate, and this was her place.”

She frowned. “That’s true.”

“So, that’s how he tracked this place down. And if he could, so could your ex, presumably. And besides,” he added sharply, surprising them both, “why did you tell me that he was your boss?”

Silence as she stared at him. He explained: “My friend’s friend said you were actually your husband’s boss. So I wanted to know.”

She glanced away, mouth tight for just an instant.

“Come on,” she said, and led him through the living room to the kitchen.

There she opened the refrigerator and got out a pitcher of iced tea. “Have a seat,” she said, indicating the kitchen table.

“Maybe I should move my van into the driveway,” Frank remembered. “I didn’t want to shock you by driving in, and I left it out on the road.”

“That was nice. Yeah, go move it in. At least for now.”

He did so, his mind racing. It was definitely foolish of her to remain exposed like this. Probably they should be leaving immediately.

He reentered the kitchen to find her sitting at the table before two glasses of iced tea, looking down at the lake. His Caroline. He sat down across from her, took a drink.

She looked at him across the table. “I was not Ed’s boss,” she said. “He was reassigned to another program. When I first came to the office, I was part of his team. I was working for him. But when the futures market program was established I was put in charge of it, and I reported to some people outside our office. Ed kept doing his own surveillance, and his group used what we were documenting, when they thought it would help them. That’s the way it was when you and I met. Then he moved again, like I told you, over to Homeland Security.”

She took a sip of her drink, met his eye again. “I never lied to you, Frank. I never have and I never will. I’ve had enough of that kind of thing. More than you’ll ever know. I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Good,” Frank said, feeling awkward. “But tell me—I mean, this is another thing I’ve really wondered about, that I’ve never remembered to ask you—what were you doing on that boat during the big flood, on the Potomac?”

Surprised, she said, “That’s Ed’s boat. I was going up to get him off Roosevelt Island.”

“That was quite a time to be out on the river.”

“Yes, it was. But he was helping some folks at the marina get their boats off, and we had already taken a few down to below Alexandria, and on one of the trips he stayed behind to help free up a boat, while I ferried one of the groups downstream. So it was kind of back and forth.”

“Ah.” Frank put a hand onto the table, reaching toward her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what to think. You know—we never have had much time. Whenever we’ve gotten together, there’s been more to say than time to say it.”

She smiled. “Too busy with other stuff.” And she put her hand on his.

He turned his palm up, and they intertwined fingers, squeezed hands. This was a whole different category of questions and answers. Do you still love me? Yes, I still love you. Do you still want me? Yes, I still want you. Yes. All that he had felt briefly before, during that hard hug on the garden path, was confirmed.

Frank took a deep breath. A flow of calmness spread from his held hand up his arm and then through the rest of him. Most of him.

“It’s true,” he said. “We’ve never had enough time. But now we do, so—tell me more. Tell me everything.”

“Okay. But you too.”

“Sure.”

But then they sat there, and it seemed too artificial just to begin their life histories or whatever. They let their hands do the talking for a while instead. They drank tea. She began to talk a little about coming to this place when she was a girl. Then about being a jock, as she put it—how Frank loved that—and how that had gotten her into various kinds of trouble, somehow. “Maybe it was a matter of liking the wrong kind of guys. Guys who are jocks are not always nice. There’s a certain percentage of assholes, and I could never tell in time.” Reading detective stories when she was a girl. Nancy Drew and Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, all of them leading her down the garden path toward intelligence, first at the CIA (“I wish I had never left”), then to a promotion, or what had seemed like a promotion, over to Homeland Security. That was where she had met Ed. The way at first he had seemed so calm, so capable, and in just the areas she was then getting interested in. The intriguing parts of spook work. The way it had let her be outdoors, or at least out and about—at first. Like a kind of sport. “Ah yeah,” Frank put in, thinking of the fun of tracking animals. “I did jobs like that too, sometimes. I wanted that too.”

Then the ways things had changed, and gone wrong, in both work and marriage. How bad it had gotten. Here she grew vague and seemed to suppress some agitation or grimness. She kept looking out the window, as did Frank. A car passed and they both were too distracted by it to go on.

“Anyway, then you and I got stuck in the elevator,” she resumed. She stopped, thinking about that perhaps; shook her head, looked out the kitchen window at the driveway again. “Let’s get out of here,” she said abruptly. “I don’t like…Why don’t we go for a drive in your van? I can show you some of the island, and I can get some time to think things through. I can’t think here right now. It’s giving me the creeps that you’re here, I mean in the sense of…And we can put your van someplace else, if I decide to come back here. You know. Just in case. I actually have my car parked down at the other end of the lake. I’ve been sailing down to it when I want to drive somewhere.”

“Sailing?”

“Iceboating.”

“Ah. Okay,” Frank said. They got up. “But—do you think we even ought to come back here?”

She frowned. He could see she was getting irritated or upset. His arrival had messed up what she had thought was a good thing. Her refuge. “I’m not sure,” she said uneasily. “I don’t think Ed will ever be able to find that one call I made to Mary. I made it from a pay phone I’ve never used before or since.”

“But—if he’s searching for something? For an old connection?”

“Yes, I know.” She gave him an odd look. “I don’t know. Let’s get going. I can think about it better when I get away from here.”

He saw that it was as he had feared; to her, his arrival was simply bad news. He wondered for a second if she had planned ever to contact him again.

They walked up the driveway to Frank’s van, and he drove them back toward Somesville, following her instructions. She looked into all the cars going past them the other way. They drove around the head of the sound, then east through more forests, past more lakes.

Eventually she had him park at a feature called Bubble Rock, which turned out to be a big glacial erratic, perched improbably on the side of a polished granite dome. Frank looked at the rocky slopes rising to both sides of the road, amazed; he had never seen granite on the East Coast before. It was as if a little patch of the Sierra Nevada had been detached by a god and cast over to the Atlantic. The granite was slightly pinker than in the Sierra, but otherwise much the same.

“Let’s go up the Goat Trail,” she said. “You’ll like it, and I need to do something.”

She led him along the road until it reached a frozen lake just under the South Bubble, then crossed the road and stood facing the steep granite slope flanking this long lake.

“That’s Jordan Pond, and this is Pemetic Mountain,” gesturing at the slope above them. “And somewhere here is the start of the Goat Trail.” She walked back and forth, scanning the broken jumble of steep rock looming over them. A very unlikely spot to begin a trail. The pink-gray granite was blackened with lichen, had the same faulted structure as any granite wall shaved by a glacier. In this case the ice resting on it had been a mile thick.

“My friend’s father was really into the trails on the island, and he took us out and told us all about them,” Caroline said. “Ah ha.” She pointed at a rusted iron rod protruding from a big slab of rock, about head high. She started up past it, using her hands for balance and the occasional extra pull up. “This was the first one, he said. It’s more of a marked route than a real trail. It’s not on the maps anymore. See, there’s the next trail duck.” Pointing above.

“Ah yeah.” Frank followed, watching her. This was his Caroline. She climbed with a sure touch. They had never done anything normal together before. She had talked about being a bicyclist, going for runs. This slope was easy but steep, and in places icy. A jock. Suddenly he felt the Caroline surge that had been there waiting in him all along.

Then the dark rock reared up into a wall of broken battlements thirty or forty feet high, one atop the next. Caroline led the way up through breaks in these walls, following a route marked by small stacks of flat rocks. In one of these gullies the bottom of the crack was filled with big flat stones set on top of each other in a rough but obvious staircase; this was as much of a trail as Frank had yet seen. “Mary’s father wouldn’t even step on those stones,” Caroline said, and laughed. “He said it would be like stepping on a painting or something. A work of art. We used to laugh so much at him.”

“I should think the guy who made the trail would like it to be used.”

“Yes, that’s what we said.”

As they ascended they saw three or four more of these little staircases, always making a hard section easier. After an hour or so the slope laid back in a graceful curve, and they were on the rounded top of the hill. Pemetic Mountain, said a wooden sign on a post stuck into a giant pile of stones. 1,247 feet.

The top was an extensive flat ridge, running south toward the ocean. Its knobby bare rock was interspersed with low bushes and sandy patches. Lichen of several different colors spotted the bedrock and the big erratics left on the ridge by the ice—some granite, others schist. Exposed rock showed glacial scouring and some remaining glacial polish. It resembled any such knob in the Sierra, although the vegetation was a bit more lush. But the air had a distinct salt tang, and off to the south was the vast plate of the ocean, blue as could be, starting just a couple miles away at the foot of the ridge. Amazing. Forested islands dotted the water offshore; wisps of fog lay farther out to sea. To the immediate right and left rose other mountaintops, all rounded to the same whaleback shape. The peaks to both east and west were higher than this one, and the biggest one, to the east, had a road running up its side, and a number of radio towers poking up through its summit forest. The ice cap had carved deep slots between the peaks, working down into fault lines in the granite between each dome. Behind them, to the north, lay the forested low hills of Maine, trees green over snowy ground.

“Beautiful,” Frank said. “It’s mountains and ocean both. I can’t believe it.”

Caroline gave him a hug. “I was hoping you would like it.”

“Oh yes. I didn’t know the East Coast had such a place as this.”

“There’s nowhere else quite like it,” she said.

They hugged for so long it threatened to become something else; then they separated and wandered the peak plateau for a while. It was cold in the wind, and Caroline shivered and suggested they return. “There’s a real trail down the northeast side, the Ravine Trail. It goes down a little cut in the granite.”

“Okay.”

They headed off the northeast shoulder of the hill, and were quickly down into scrubby trees. Here the ice had hit the rock head-on, and the enormous pressures had formed the characteristic upstream side of a drumlin: smooth, rounded, polished, any flaw stripped open. And exposed to air for no more than ten thousand years; thus there was hardly any soil on this slope, which meant all the trees on it were miniaturized. They hiked down a good trail through this krummholz like giants.

It was a familiar experience for Frank, and yet this time he was following the lithe and graceful figure of his lover or girlfriend or he didn’t know what, descending neatly before him, like a tree goddess. Some kind of happiness or joy or desire began to seep under his worry. Surely it had been a good idea to come here. He had had to do it; he couldn’t have not done it.

The trail led them into the top of a narrow couloir in the granite, a flaw from which all loose rock had been plucked. Cedar beams were set crosswise in the bottom of this ravine, forming big solid stairs, somewhat snowed over. The sidewalls were covered with lichen, moss, ice. When they came out of the bottom of the couloir, the stairboxes underfoot were replaced by a long staircase of immense rectangular granite blocks.

“This is more like the usual trail on the east side,” Caroline said, pointing at these monstrous field stones. “For a while, the thing they liked to do was make granite staircases, running up every fault line they could find. Sometimes there’ll be four or five hundred stairs in a row.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Every peak on the east side has three or four trails like that running up them, sometimes right next to each other. The redundancy didn’t bother them at all.”

“So they really were works of art.”

“Yes. But the National Park didn’t get it, and when they took over they closed a lot of the trails and took them off the maps. But since the trails have these big staircases in them, they last whether they’re maintained or not. Mary’s dad collected old maps, and was part of a group that went around finding the old trails. Now the park is restoring some of them.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I don’t think there is anything like it. Even here they only did this for a few years. It was like a fad. But a fad in granite never goes away.”

Frank laughed. “It looks like something the Incas might have done.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” She stopped and looked back up the snowy stone steps, splotchy here with pale green lichen.

“I can see why you would want to stay here,” Frank said cautiously when they started again.

“Yes. I love it.”

“But…”

“I think I’m okay,” she said.

For a while they went back and forth on this, saying much the same things they had said at the house. Whether Ed would look at her subjects, whether he would be able to find Mary…

Finally Frank shrugged. “You don’t want to leave here.”

“It’s true,” she said. “I like it here. And I feel hidden.”

“But now you know better. Someone looked for you and they found you. That’s got to be the main thing.”

“I guess,” she muttered.

They came to the road they had parked beside. They walked back to his van and she had him drive south, down the shore of Jordan Pond.

“Some of my first memories are from here,” she said, looking out the window at the lake. “We came almost every summer. I always loved it. That lasted for several years, I’d guess, but then her parents got divorced and I stopped seeing her, and so I stopped coming.”

“Ah.”

“So, we did start college together and roomed that first year, but to tell the truth, I hadn’t thought of her for years. But when I was thinking about how to really get away, if I ever wanted to, I remembered it. I never talked to Ed about Mary, and I just made the one call to her here from a pay phone.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I gave her the gist of the situation. She was willing to let me stay.”

“That’s good. Unless, you know…I just don’t know. I mean, you tell me just how dangerous these guys are. Some shots were fired that night in the park, after you left. My friends were the ones who started it, but your ex and his friends definitely shot back. And so, given that…”

Now she looked appalled. “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. I also…I threw a rock at your ex,” he added lamely.

“You what?”

“I threw my hand axe at him. I saw a look on his face I didn’t like, and I just did it.” And in fact the stone was below in the glove compartment of his van.

She squeezed his hand. Her face had the grim inward expression it took on whenever she was thinking about her ex. “I know that look,” she muttered. “I hate it too.” And then: “I’m sorry I’ve gotten you into this.”

“No. Anyway, I missed him. Luckily. But he saw the rock go by his head, or felt it. He took off running down the Metro stairs. So he definitely knows something is up.” Frank didn’t mention going by their apartment afterward and ringing the doorbell; he was already embarrassed enough about the hand axe. “So, what I’m still worried about is if he starts looking, and, you know, happens to replicate what my friend’s friend did.”

“I know.” She sighed. “I guess I’m hoping that he’s not all that intent on me anymore. I have him chipped, and he’s always in D.C., at the office, moving from room to room. I’ve got him covered in a number of ways—a spot cam on our apartment entry, and things like that, and he seems to be following his ordinary routine.”

“Even so—he could be doing that while sending some of his team here to check things out.”

She thought about it. Sighed a big sigh. “I hate to leave here when there might not be a reason to.”

Frank said nothing; his presence was itself proof of a reason. Thus his appearance had indeed been a bad thing. The transitive law definitely applied to emotions.

She had directed him through some turns, and now they were driving around the head of Somes Sound again, back toward her place. As he slowed through Somesville, he said, “Where should we put my van?”

She ran her hands through her short curls, thinking it over. “Let’s put it down where my car is. I’m parked at the south end of Long Pond, at the pump house there. First drop me off at the house, then drive down there, and I’ll sail down on the iceboat and pick you up.”

So he drove to her camp and dropped her off at the house, feeling nervous as he did so. Then he followed her instructions, back toward Southwest Harbor, then west through the forest again, on a winding small road. He only had a rough sense of where he was, but then he was driving down an incline, and the smooth white surface of Long Pond appeared through the trees. The southern end of its long arm was walled on both sides by steep granite slopes, six or seven hundred feet high: a pure glacial U, floored by a lake.

He parked in the little parking lot by the pump house and got out. The wind from the north slammed him in the face. Far up the lake he saw a tiny sail appear as if out of the rock wall to the left. It looked like a big windsurfing sail. Faster than he would have thought possible it grew larger, and the iceboat swept up to the shore, Caroline at the tiller, turning it in a neat curlicue at the end, to lose speed and drift backward to shore.

“Amazing,” Frank said.

“Here, wait—park your van up in those trees, just past the stop sign up there.”

Frank did so and then returned to the craft, stepped in and stowed his daypack before the mast. The iceboat was a wooden triangular contraption, obviously handmade, more like a big soapbox-derby car than a boat. Three heavy struts extended from the cockpit box, one ahead and two sideways and back from the cockpit. It was an odd-looking thing, but the mast and sails seemed to have been scavenged from an ordinary sloop, and Caroline was obviously familiar with it. Her face was flushed with the wind, and she looked pleased in a way Frank had never seen before. She pulled the sail taut and twisted the tiller, which set the angles of the big metal skates out at the ends of the rear struts, and with a clatter they gained speed and were off in a chorus of scraping.

The iceboat did not heel in the wind, but when gusts struck it merely squeaked and slid along even faster, the skates making a loud clattery hiss. When a really strong gust hit, the craft rocketed forward with a palpable jolt. Frank’s eyes watered heavily under the assault of the wind. He ducked when Caroline told him to, their heads together as the boom swung over them as part of a big curving tack. To get up the narrow lake against the wind they would have to tack a lot; the craft did not appear able to hold too close to the wind.

As they worked their way north, Caroline explained that Mary’s grandfather had built the iceboat out of wood left over from when he had built the garage. “He built everything there, even some of the furniture. He dug out the cellar, built the chimney, the terraces, the dock and rowboats….” Mary’s father had told them about this; Caroline had met the grandfather only once, when she was very young.

“This last month I’ve been feeling like he’s still around the place, like a ghost, but in the best kind of way. The first night I got here the electricity wasn’t on and there was no sound at all. I never realized how used to noise we’ve gotten. That there’s always some kind of sound, even if it’s only the refrigerator.”

“Usually it’s a lot more than that,” Frank said, thinking of how D.C. sounded from his treehouse.

“Yes. But this time it was completely quiet. I began to hear myself breathing. I could even hear my heart beat. And then there was a loon on the lake. It was so beautiful. And I thought of Mary’s grandfather building everything, and it seemed like he was there. Not a voice, just part of the house somehow. It was comforting.”

“Good for him,” Frank said. He liked the sound of such a moment, also the fact that she had noticed it. It occurred to him again how little he knew her. She was watching the ice ahead of the boat, holding the boom line and the tiller in place, making small adjustments, splayed in the cockpit as if holding a kind of dance position with the wind. And there they were barreling across the frozen surface of the lake, the ice blazing in a low tarnished sun that was smeared out in long bars of translucid cloud—the wind frigid, and flying through him as if the gusts were stabs of feeling for her—for the way she was capable, the way she liked it out here. He had thought she would be like this, but they had spent so little time together he could not be sure. But now he was seeing it. His Caroline, real in the sunlight and the wind. A gust of wind was a surge of feeling.

She brought the iceboat around again, east to west, and continued the smooth curve west, as they were now shooting into the channel that began the other arm of the lake’s Y. Here the north wind was somewhat blocked by the peninsula separating the two arms of the lake, and the iceboat slid along with less speed and noise. Then another curve, and they were headed into the wind again, on the short arm of the Y, running up to a little island she called Rum Island, which turned out to be just a round bump of snow and trees in the middle of a narrow part of the lake.

As they were about to pass Rum Island, something beeped in Caroline’s jacket pocket. “Shit!” she said, and snatched out a small device, like a handheld GPS or a cell phone. She steered with a knee while she held it up to her face to see it in the sunlight. She cursed again. “Someone’s at camp.”

She swerved, keeping Rum Island between the boat and Mary’s place. As they approached the island she turned into the wind and let loose the sail, so that they skidded into a tiny cove and onto a gravel beach no bigger than the iceboat itself. They stepped over the side onto icy gravel, and tied the boat to a tree, then made their way to the island’s other side. The trees on the island hooted and creaked like the Sierras in a storm, a million pine needles whooshing their great chorale. It was strange to see the lake surface perfectly still and white under the slaps of such a hard blow.

Across that white expanse, the green house and its little white boathouse were the size of postage stamps. Caroline had binoculars in the boat, however, and through them the house’s lake side was quite distinct; and through its big windows there was movement.

“Someone inside.”

“Yes.”

They crouched behind a big schist erratic. Caroline took the binoculars back from him and balanced them on the rock, then bent over and looked through them for a long time. “It looks like Andy and George,” she said in a low voice, as if they might overhear. “Uh oh—get down,” and she pulled him down behind the boulder. “There’s a couple more up by the house, with some kind of scope. Can those IR glasses you use for the animals see heat this far away?”

“Yes,” Frank said. He had often used IR when tracking the ferals in Rock Creek. He took the binoculars back from her and looked around the side of the boulder near the ground, with only one lens exposed.

There they were—looking out toward the island—then hustling down the garden path and onto the ice itself, their long dark overcoats flapping in the wind. “Jesus,” he said, “they’re coming over here to check! They must have seen our heat.”

“Damn it,” she said. “Let’s go, then.”

They ran back over the little island to the beach. A hard kick from Caroline to the hull of the iceboat and it was off the gravel and ready to sail. Push it around, get in and take off, waiting helplessly for the craft to gain speed, which it did with an icy scratching that grew louder as they slid out from the island’s wind shadow and skidded south.

“You saw four of them?” Frank asked.

“Yes.”

Skating downwind did not feel as fast as crossing the lake had, but then they passed the end of the peninsula, and Caroline steered the craft in another broad curve, and as she did it picked up speed until it shot across the ice, into the gap leading to the longer stretch of the lake. Looking back, Frank saw the men crossing the lake. They saw him; one of them took a phone from his jacket pocket and held it to his ear. Back at the house, tiny now, he saw the two others running around the back of the house.

Then the point of the peninsula blocked the view.

“The ones still at the house went for the driveway,” he said. “They’re going to drive around the lake, I bet. Do you think they can get to the southern end of the lake before we do?”

“Depends on the wind,” Caroline said. “Also, they might stop at Pond’s End, for a second at least, to take a look and see if we’re coming up to that end.”

“But it wouldn’t make sense for us to do that.”

“Unless we had parked there. But they’ll only stop a second, because they’ll be able to see us. You can see all the way down the lake. So they’ll see which way we’re going.”

“And then?”

“I think we can beat them. They’ll have to circle around on the roads. If the wind holds, I’m sure we can beat them.”

The craft emerged from the channel onto the long stretch of the lake, where the wind was even stronger. Looking through the binoculars as best he could given the chatter, Frank saw a dark van stop at the far end of the pond, then, after a few moments’ pause, drive on.

He had made the same drive himself a couple of hours before, and it seemed to him it had taken about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, to get to the south end of the pond by way of the small roads through the woods. But he hadn’t been hurrying. At full speed it might take only half that.

But now the iceboat had the full force of the north wind behind it, funneling down the steep granite walls to both sides—and the gusts felt stronger than ever, even though they were running straight downwind. The boat only touched the ice along the edges of the metal runners, screeching their banshee trio. Caroline’s attention was fixed on the sail, her body hunched at the tiller and line, feeling the wind like a telegraph operator. Frank didn’t disturb her, but only sat on the gunwale opposite to the sail, as she had told him to do. The stretch of the lake they had to sail looked a couple of miles long. In a sailboat they would have been in trouble. On the ice, however, they zipped along as if in a catamaran’s dream, almost frictionless despite the loud noise of what friction was left. Frank guessed they were going about twenty miles an hour, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty; it was hard to tell. Fast enough: down a granite wind tunnel, perfectly shaped to their need for speed. The dwarf trees on the steep granite slopes to each side bounced and whistled, the sun was almost blocked by the western cliff, blazing in the pale streaked sky, whitening the cloud to each side of it. Caroline spared a moment to give Frank a look, and it seemed she was going to speak, then shook her head and simply gestured at the surrounding scene, mouth tight. Frustrated.

“I guess them showing up so soon suggests I tipped them off somehow,” he said.

“Yes.” She was looking at the sail.

“I’m sorry. I thought I needed to warn you.”

Her mouth stayed tight. She said nothing.

The minutes dragged, but Frank’s watch showed that only eight had passed when they came to the south end of the lake. There were a couple of big houses tucked back in the forest to the left. Caroline pulled the tiller and boom line and brought them into the beach next to the pump house, executing a bravura late turn that hooked so hard Frank was afraid the iceboat might be knocked on its side. Certainly a windsurfer or catamaran would have gone down like a bowling pin. But there was nothing for the iceboat to do but groan and scrape and spin, into the wind and past it, then screeching back, then stopping, then drifting back onto the beach.

“Hurry,” Caroline said, and jumped out and ran up to Frank’s van.

Frank followed. “What about the boat?”

She grimaced. “We have to leave it!” Then, when they were in his van: “I’ll call Mary when I can get a clean line and tell her where it is. I’d hate for Harold’s boat to be lost because of this shit.” Her voice was suddenly vicious.

Then she was all business, giving Frank directions; they got out to a paved road and turned right, and Frank accelerated as fast as he dared on the still frozen road, which was often in shadow, and seemed a good candidate for black ice. When they came to a T-stop she had him turn right. “My car’s right there, the black Honda. I’m going to take off.”

“Where?”

“I’ve got a place. I’ve got to hurry, I don’t want them to see me at the bridge. You should head directly for the bridge and get off the island. Go back home.”

“Okay,” Frank said. He could feel himself entering one of his indecision fugues, and was grateful she had such a strong sense of what they should do. “Look, I’m sorry about this. I thought I had to warn you.”

“I know. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. It was good of you to try to help. I know why you did it.” And she leaned over and gave him a quick peck of a kiss before she got out.

“I was pretty sure my van is clean,” Frank said. “And my stuff too. We checked all of it out.”

“They may have you under other kinds of surveillance. Satellite cameras, or people just tailing you.”

“Satellite cameras? Is that possible?”

“Of course.” Annoyed that he could be so ignorant.

Frank shrugged, thinking it over. He would have to ask Edgardo. Right now he was glad she was giving him directions.

She came around the van and leaned in on his side. Frank could see she was angry.

“You’ll be able to come back here someday,” he said.

“I hope so.”

“You know,” he said, “instead of holing up somewhere, you could stay with people who would keep you hidden, and cover for you.”

“Like Anne Frank?”

Startled, Frank said, “Well, I guess so.”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t stand it. And I wouldn’t want to put anyone else to the trouble.”

“Well, but what about me? I’m staying with the Khembalis in almost that way already. They’re very helpful, and their place is packed with people.”

Again she shook her head. “I’ve got a Plan C, and it’s down in that area. Once I get into that I can contact you again.”

“If we can figure out a clean system.”

“Yes. I’ll work on that. We can always set up a dead drop.”

“My friends from the park live all over the city—”

“I’ve got a plan!” she said sharply.

“Okay.” He shook his head, swallowed; tasted blood at the back of his throat.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said automatically.

“Something,” she said, and reached in to touch the side of his head. “Tell me what you just thought. Tell me quick, I’ve got to go, but I didn’t like that look!”

He told her about it as briefly as he could. Taste of blood. Inability to make decisions. Maybe it was sounding like he was making excuses for coming up to warn her. She was frowning. When he was done, she shook her head.

“Frank? Go see a doctor.”

“I know.”

“Don’t say that! I want you to promise me. Make the appointment, and then go see the doctor.”

“Okay. I will.”

“All right, now I’ve got to go. I think they’ve got you chipped. Be careful and go right back home. I’ll be in touch.”

“How?”

She grimaced. “Just go!”

A phrase which haunted him as he made the long drive south. Back to home; back to work; back to Diane. Just go!

He could not seem to come to grips with what happened. The island was dreamlike in the way it was so vivid and surreal, but detached from any obvious meaning. Heavily symbolic of something that could nevertheless not be decoded. They had hugged so hard, and yet had never really kissed; they had climbed together up a rock wall, they had iceboated on a wild wind, and yet in the end she had been angry, perhaps with him, and holding back from saying things, it had seemed. He wasn’t sure.

Mile after mile winged by, minute after minute; on and on they went, by the tens, then the hundreds. And as night fell, and his world reduced to a pattern of white and red lights, both moving and still, with glowing green signs and their white lettering providing name after name, his feel for his location on the globe became entirely theoretical to him, and everything grew stranger and stranger. Some kind of fugue state, the same thoughts over and over. Obsession without compulsion. Headlights in the rearview mirror; who could tell if they were from the same vehicle or not?

It became hard to believe there was anything outside the lit strip of the highway. Once Kenzo had shown him a USGS map of the United States that had displayed the human population as raised areas, and on that map the 95 corridor had been like an immense Himalaya, from Atlanta to Boston, rising from both directions to the Everest that was New York. And yet driving right down the spine of this great density of his species he could see nothing but the walls of trees lining both sides of the endless slot. He might as well have been driving south though Siberia, or over the face of some empty forest planet, tracking some great circle route that was only going to bring him back where he had started. The forest hid so much.

-

DESPITE THE REESTABLISHED GULF STREAM, the jet stream still snaked up and down the Northern Hemisphere under its own pressures, and now a strong cold front rode it south from Hudson Bay and arrived just in time to strike the inauguration. When the day dawned, temperatures in the capital region hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit, with clear sunny skies and a north wind averaging fifteen miles an hour. Everyone out of doors had to bundle up, so it was a slow process at all the security checkpoints. The audience settled onto the cold aluminum risers set on the east side of the Capitol, and Phil Chase and his entourage stepped onto the dais, tucked discreetly behind its walls of protective glass. The cold air and Phil’s happy, relaxed demeanor reminded Charlie of the Kennedy inauguration, and images of JFK and Earl Warren and Robert Frost filled his mind as he felt Joe kicking him in the back. He had only been a few years older than Joe when he had seen that one on TV. Thus the generations span the years, and now his boy was huddled against him, heavy as a rock, dragging him down but keeping him warm. “Dad, let’s go to the zoo! Wanna go to the zoo!”

“Okay, Joe, but after this, okay? This is history!”

“His story?”

Phil stood looking out at the crowd after the oath of office was administered by the Chief Justice, a man about ten years younger than he was. With a wave of his gloved hand he smiled his beautiful smile.

“Fellow Americans,” he said, pacing his speech to the reverb of the loudspeakers, “you have entrusted me with the job of president during a difficult time. The crisis we face now, of abrupt climate change and crippling damage to the biosphere, is a very dangerous one, to be sure. But we are not at war with anyone, and in fact we face a challenge that all humanity has to meet together. On this podium, Franklin Roosevelt said, ‘This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.’ Now it’s true again. We are the generation that has to deal with the profound destruction that will be caused by the global warming that has already been set in motion. The potential disruption of the natural order is so great that scientists warn of a mass extinction event. Losses on that scale would endanger all humanity, and so we cannot fail to address the threat. The lives of our children, and all their descendants, depend on us doing so.

“So, like FDR and his generation, we have to face the great challenge of our time. We have to use our government to organize a total social response to the problem. That took courage then, and we will need courage now. In the years since we used our government to help get us out of the Great Depression, it has sometimes been fashionable to belittle the American government as some kind of foreign burden laid on us. That attitude is nothing more than an attack on American history, deliberately designed to shift power away from the American people. I want us to remember how Abraham Lincoln said it: ‘that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.’ This is the crucial concept of American democracy—that government expresses what the majority of us would like to do as a society. It’s us. We do it to us and for us. I believe this reminder is so important that I intend to add the defining phrase ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ every time I use the word ‘government,’ and I intend to do all I can to make that phrase be a true description. It will make me even more long-winded than I was before, but I am willing to pay that price, and you are going to have to pay it with me.

“So, this winter, with your approval and support, I intend to instruct my team in the executive branch of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, to initiate a series of federal actions and changes designed to meet the problem of global climate change head-on. We will deal with it as a society working together, and working with the rest of the world. It’s a global project, and so I will go to the United Nations and tell them that the United States is ready to join the international effort. We will also help the under-developed world to develop using clean technology, so that all the good aspects of development will not be drowned in its bad side effects—often literally drowned. In our own country, meanwhile, we will do all it takes to shift to clean technologies as quickly as possible.”

Phil paused to survey the crowd. “My, it’s cold out here today! You can feel right now, right down to the bone, that what I am saying is true. We’re out in the cold, and we need to change the way we do things. And it’s not just a technological problem, having to do with our machinery alone. The devastation of the biosphere is also a result of there being too many human beings for the planet to support over the long haul. If the human population continues to increase as it has risen in the past, all progress we might make will be overwhelmed.

“But what is very striking to observe is that everywhere on this Earth where good standards of justice prevail, the rate of reproduction is about at the replacement rate. While wherever justice, and the full array of rights as described in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, is somehow denied to some portion of the population, especially to women and children, the rate of reproduction either balloons to unsustainably rapid growth rates, or crashes outright. Now you can argue all you want about why this correlation exists, but the correlation itself is striking and undeniable. So this is one of those situations in which what we do for good in one area, helps us again in another. It is a positive feedback loop with the most profound implications. Consider: for the sake of climate stabilization, there must be population stabilization; and for there to be population stabilization, justice must prevail. Every person on the planet must live with the full array of human rights that all nations have already ascribed to when signing the UN Charter. When we achieve that, at that point, and at that point only, we will begin to reproduce at a sustainable rate.

“To help that to happen, I intend to make sure that the United States joins the global justice project fully, unequivocally, and without any double standards. This means accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and the jurisdiction of the World Court in the Hague. It means abiding by all the clauses of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which after all we have already signed. It means supporting UN peacekeeping forces, and supporting the general concept of the UN as the body through which international conflicts get resolved. It means supporting the World Health Organization in all its reproductive rights and population reduction efforts. It means supporting women’s education and women’s rights everywhere, even in cultures where men’s tyrannies are claimed to be some sort of tradition. All these commitments on our part will be crucial if we are serious about building a sustainable world. There are three legs to this effort, folks: technology, environment, and social justice. None of the three can be neglected.

“So, some of what we do may look a little unconventional at first. And it may look more than a little threatening to those few who have been trying, in effect, to buy our government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and use it to line their own pockets while the world goes smash. But you know what? Those people need to change too. They’re out in the cold the same as the rest of us. So we will proceed, and hope those opposed come to see the good in it.

“Ultimately we will be exploring all peaceful means to initiate positive changes in our systems, in order to hand on to the generations to come a world that is as beautiful and bountiful as the one we were born into. We are only the temporary stewards of a mighty trust, which includes the lives of all the future generations to come. We are responsible to our children and theirs. What we do now will reveal much about our character and our values as a people. We have to rise to the occasion, and I think we can and will. I am going to throw myself into the effort wholeheartedly and with a feeling of high excitement, as if beginning a long journey over stormy seas.”

“Good,” Charlie said into his phone. “He’s still saying the right stuff.”

“Heck yes,” Roy replied in his ear. “But you know the old saying: an ounce of law is worth a pound of rhetoric.” Roy had made up this saying, and trotted it out as often as possible. He was seated on the opposite side of the viewing stands from Charlie and Joe, and Charlie thought he could just spot him talking into his cell phone across the way, but with all the hats and mufflers and ski masks bundling the heads of the audience, he could not be sure. Roy continued, “We’ll see if we can wag the dog or not. Things bog down in this town.”

“I think the dog will wag us,” Charlie said. “I think we are the dog. We’re the dog of the people, by the people and for the people.”

“We’ll see.” As chief of staff, Roy had already worked so hard on the transition that he had, Charlie feared, lost all sight of the big picture: “Everything depends on how the start goes.”

Charlie said, “A good start would help. But whatever happens, we have to persevere. Right, Joe?”

“Go Phil! Hey, Dad? It’s cold.”

The transition team had concocted its “first sixty days”—a gigantic master list of Things To Do, parceled out among the many agencies of the executive branch. Each agency had its own transition team and its own list, which usually began with a status report. Many units had been deliberately disabled by previous administrations, so that they would require a complete retooling to be able to function. In others, change at the top would rally the efforts of the remaining permanent staff, made up of professional technocrats. Each agency had to be evaluated for these problems and qualities, and the amount of attention given to them adjusted accordingly.

For Charlie, this meant working full-time, as he had agreed back in November. Everyone else was up to speed and beyond, and he felt an obligation to match them. Up before sunrise, therefore, groggy in the cold dark of the depths of winter, when (Frank said) hominids living this far north had used to go into a dream state very close to hibernation. Get Joe up, or at least transferred sleeping into his stroller. Quick walk with Anna down to the Metro station in Bethesda—companionable, as if they were still in bed together, or sharing a dream; Charlie could almost fall back asleep on such a walk. Then descend with her into the Earth, dimly lit and yet still lighter than the predawn world above. Slump in a bright vinyl seat and snooze against Anna to Metro Center, where she changed trains and they went up in elevators to the sidewalk, to have a last brisk walk together, Joe often awake and babbling, down G Street to the White House. There pass through security, more quickly each time, and down to the daycare center, where Joe bounced impatiently in his stroller until he could clamber over the side and plow off into the fun. He was always one of the first kids there and one of the last to leave, and that was saying a lot. But he did not remark on this, and did not seem to mind. He was still nice to the other kids. Indeed the various teachers all told Charlie how well he got along with the other kids.

Charlie found these reports depressing. He could see with his own eyes the beginning and end of Joe’s days in daycare, but there weren’t as many kids there at those times. And he remembered Gymboree, indeed had been traumatized by certain incidents at Gymboree.

Now, as everyone pointed out, Joe was calm to the point of detachment. Serene. In his own space. In the daycare he looked somewhat like he would have during a quiet moment on the floor of their living room at home; perhaps a bit more wary. It worried Charlie more than he could say. Anna would not understand the nature of his concern, and aside from her…he might have mentioned it to Roy during one of their phone calls, back in the old days. But Roy had no time and was obsessed, and there was no one else with whom to share the feeling that Joe had changed and was not himself. That wasn’t something you could say.

Sometimes he brought it up with Anna obliquely, as a question, and she agreed that Joe was different than he had been before his fever, but she seemed to regard it as within the normal range of childhood changes, and mostly a function of learning to talk. Growing up. Her theory was that as Joe learned to talk he got less and less frustrated, that his earlier tempestuousness had been frustration at not being able to communicate what he was thinking.

But this theory presupposed that the earlier Joe had been inarticulate, and in possession of thoughts he had wanted to communicate to the world but couldn’t; and that did not match Charlie’s experience. In his opinion, Joe had always communicated exactly whatever he was feeling or thinking. Even before he had had language, his thoughts had still been perfectly explicit, though not linguistic. They had been precise feelings, and Joe had expressed them precisely, and with well-nigh operatic virtuosity.

In any case, now it was different. To Charlie, radically different. Anna didn’t see that, and it would upset her if Charlie could persuade her to see it, so he did not try. He wasn’t even sure what it was he would be trying to convey. He didn’t really believe that the real Joe had gone away as a result of the Khembalis’ ceremony for him. When Charlie had made the request, his rather vague notion had been that what such a ceremony would dispel would be the Khembalis’ interest in Joe, and their belief that he harbored the spirit of one of their reincarnated lamas. Altering the Khembalis’ attitude toward Joe would then change Joe himself, but in minor ways—ways that Charlie now found he had not fully imagined, for how exactly had he thought that Joe was “not himself,” beyond being feverish, and maybe a bit subdued, a bit cautious and fearful? Had that really been the result of the Khembalis’ regard? And if their regard were to change, why exactly would Joe go back to the way he was before—feisty, bold, full of himself?

Perhaps he wouldn’t. It had not worked out that way, and now Charlie’s ideas seemed flawed to him. Now he had to try to figure out just exactly what it was he had wanted, what he thought had happened in the ceremony, and what he thought was happening now.

It was a hard thing to get at, made harder by the intensity of his new schedule. He only saw Joe for a couple of hours a day, during their commutes, and their time in the Metro cars was confined, with both of them asleep on many a morning’s ride in, and both of them tired and distracted by the day’s events on the way home. Charlie would sit Joe beside him, or on his lap, and they would talk, and Joe was pretty similar to his old self, babbling away at things outside the window or in his stroller, or referring to events earlier in his day, telling semicoherent stories. It was hard to be sure what he was talking about most of the time, although toys and teachers and the other kids were clear enough, and formed the basis of most of his conversation.

But then they would walk home and enter the house, and life with Anna and Nick, and often that was the last they would have to do with each other until bedtime. So—who knew? It was not like the old days, with the vast stretches of the day, the week, the season, extending before and behind them in a perpetual association not unlike the lives of Siamese twins. Charlie now saw only fragmentary evidence. It was hard to be sure of anything.

Nevertheless. He saw what he saw. Joe was not the same. And so, trapped at the back of his mind (but always there) was the fear that he had somehow misunderstood and asked for the wrong thing for his son—and gotten it.

As the winter deepened it became more and more expensive to warm the entire house. The price of heating oil became a political issue, but President Chase tried to keep the focus on the alternative sources they needed to develop. At the Quiblers’, Anna programmed the house’s thermostat to choreograph their evenings, so that they congregated in the kitchen and living room in the early evenings, and then bumped the heat upstairs in the hour before bedtime to augment whatever heat had gathered there from below. It worked fairly well, following and reinforcing what they would have done anyway. But one exceptionally cold night in early February the power went out, and everything was suddenly different.

Anna had a supply of flashlights and candles in a cabinet in the dining room, and quickly she banged her way to them and got some candles lit in every room. She turned on a battery-powered radio, and Nick twiddled the dial trying to find some news. While Charlie was building up the fire in the fireplace, they listened to a crackly distant voice that said a cold front like one from the winter before had dropped temperatures across New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey by up to sixty degrees in twenty minutes, presumably causing a surge in demand or a malfunction at some point in the grid, thus crashing the system.

“I’m glad we all got home in time,” Anna said. “We could have been in the Metro somewhere.”

They could hear sirens beginning to oscillate through the air of the city. The Metro had an emergency generating system, Charlie thought, but no doubt the streets were clotted with cars, as they could see was true out on Wisconsin, just visible from their front window. When Charlie stepped outside to get more firewood from their screened-in porch, he smelled the smell of a power outage, unexpectedly familiar from the winter before: exhaust of burned generator fuel, smoke of green firewood.

Inside the boys were clamoring for marshmallows. Anna had unearthed a bag of them at the back of a kitchen cabinet. Anna passed on trying one, to Joe’s amazement, and went to the kitchen to whip up a late salad, keeping the refrigerator door open for as short a time as possible, wondering as she did so how quickly an unopened refrigerator would lose its chill. She resolved to buy a couple of thermometers to find out. The information might come in useful.

Back in the living room, Charlie had finished lighting all the candles in the house, a profligacy that created a fine glow, especially when they were set around the room where the shadows from the fire congregated the most. Carrying one upstairs, Anna watched the shadows shift and flicker with her steps, and wondered if they would be warm enough up there that night; the bedrooms felt colder than the inside of the refrigerator had. She wondered briefly if a refrigerator would work to keep things from freezing in a subzero house.

“We should maybe sleep on the couches down here,” she said when she was back in the living room. “Do we have enough firewood to keep a fire going all night?”

“I think so,” Charlie said. “If the wood will burn.”

Last winter after the cold snap, there had been a period when firewood had been deemed cheaper heat than oil or gas, and all the cured firewood had been quickly bought and burned. This year green wood was almost all that was available, and it burned very poorly, as Charlie was now finding out. He threw in a paraffin-and-sawdust log from time to time, and used his massive wrought-iron fire tongs to lift the heavy recalcitrant logs over the fake ones to dry them out and keep things going.

“Remind me to buy dry wood next time.”

Anna took her bowl back into the kitchen. Water was still running, but it wouldn’t for long. She filled her pots, and a couple of five-gallon plastic jugs they had in the basement. These too would freeze eventually, unless she put them near the fire. They needed a better blackout routine, she saw. She took them out to the living room and saw the boys settling in. This must be how it had been, she thought, for generations on end; everyone huddling together at night for warmth. Probably she would have to work from home the next day, though her laptop battery was depleted. She wished laptop batteries lasted longer.

“Remind me to check the freezer in the morning. I want to see if things have started to thaw.”

“If you open it, it will lose its cool.”

“Unless the kitchen is colder than the freezer. I’ve been wondering about that.”

“Maybe we should just leave the freezer door open then.”

“Maybe we can get the fire going in it!”

They laughed at this, but Anna still felt uneasy.

They built a city on the coffee table using Joe’s blocks, then read by candlelight. Charlie and Nick hauled an old double mattress that they called the tigers’ bed up from the basement, and they laid it right before the fire, where Joe used it as a trampoline which looked like it was going to slingshot him right into the feeble blaze.

When everything was arranged, Charlie read aloud some pages from The Once and Future King, about what it was like to be a goose migrating over the Norwegian Sea—a passage that had Anna and the boys entranced. Finally they put out the candles, and fell asleep—

Only to awaken all together, surprised and disoriented, when the power came back on. It was 2 a.m., and beyond the reach of the smoldering gray coals the house was very cold, but fully lit, and buzzing with the sounds of its various machines. Anna and Charlie got up to turn the lights off. The boys were already asleep again by the time they got back downstairs.

The next day, things were back to normal, more or less, though the air was still smoky. Everyone wanted to tell stories about where they had been when the power went off, and what had happened to them.

“It was actually kind of nice,” Charlie said the next night at dinner. “A little adventure.”

Anna had to agree, though she was still uneasy. “It wouldn’t have been if the power were still off.”