Sixty Days and Counting

-

Wake up Sunday morning. In the van, outside a fregan potluck house, down in Foggy Bottom. Put on clothes one would wear to give a talk: “scientist nice,” meaning shirt with collar, dark walking shoes, Dockers pants.

Walk to the Optimodal that Diane found near the White House. Work out, shower and shave, then east on G Street. Find a deli open for lunch; most of them closed on weekend. Eat lunch and then continue east to the MCI Center, where the Wizards play basketball.

A building like all the others in the area, filling a whole block. This one, instead of offices and shops bordering the sidewalk, has glass doors by the dozen, and poster-holders between the doors, advertising all kinds of events. The glass doors have lines of people outside them. Many Asians, many of them in Asian attire.

Wait in line, then give an attendant a Ticketron ticket. Inside, wander down the hallway looking at the tunnel entries, checking the section numbers. Hallway lined with food stalls and souvenir stands and restrooms, as in any sports arena in the country. Beer, wine, hot dogs, pretzels, nachos. Like a basketball game, or a rock concert. Strange to see when attending a talk by the Dalai Lama. Walking in a category error. Maybe that was always true.

Plan to meet the Quiblers at their seats, a good thing; impossible to tell if one has circled ninety degrees or a hundred and eighty. Which way is north? No way to tell.

After two hundred and seventy degrees, perhaps, come to proper number and show ticket to usher, get ushered to seat. Great seats if it were basketball, in the middle, just above floor, which is now occupied by rows of chairs, slowly filling with people. Stage at the end of the floor, where one basket would be. Empty seats; presumably the Quiblers’. An hour and a half before the scheduled start. Don’t want to be late for the Dalai Lama! Arena at this point nearly empty. And big. A big oval of seats, rising to a great height on all sides. Was that glassed row what they called luxury boxes? Maybe the Dalai Lama is not a sellout.

But he is. Arena fills. Quiblers show up around half an hour before the start. Shake hands with Charlie and the boys, give Anna a hug. She too dressed up a bit—as if giving a talk at a conference, yes. Looks nice. All the women in the arena look nice.

Sit and chat about the crowd and the venue and the event, the boys looking around with the same curious expression one can feel in one’s own face. Watching people. Mesmerized by the sight of so many people, pouring in tunnels from concourse and taking their seats. Charlie says capacity twenty thousand, but with the section behind the stage cordoned off and left empty, more like thirteen thousand. Thirteen thousand human beings, all races, nations, and ethnicities seemingly represented. All gathered to hear one man speak. This is Washington, D.C. Capital of the world.

A big screen behind the stage. They test a video system that shows, greatly magnified on the screen, the image of an armchair on the stage, which makes the actual chair suddenly look tiny. There are two armchairs, in fact, and a carpet between them, a coffee table. Small tree in pot behind. Bouquets of flowers surround the base of a lectern, set off to one side.

People appear on stage, causing a groundswell of voices, then applause. An American woman from the Tibetan-American Friendship Society welcomes the crowd, which now packs the arena to capacity, no unoccupied seats to be seen, except in the empty section behind the screen. A Democratic congresswoman introduces the Dalai Lama, at great length and with little eloquence. Then a pause; the hall goes silent.

“What?” Joe asks, looking around bug-eyed.

A cluster of people in maroon robes walk up the steps onto the stage, and sudden applause bursts out. Everyone stands, everyone. Joe stands on his chair, then climbs into Charlie’s arms. His head is then just higher than Charlie’s. Now it can be seen how their faces look alike.

Dalai Lama on stage. A big swell of applause. He wears the kind of robe that leaves his arms bare. He holds his hands together, bows slightly in various directions, smiling graciously. All this is repeated hugely on the screen behind him. The face familiar from photographs. An ordinary Tibetan monk, as he always says himself.

On the stage with him appears a shorter Tibetan man in a Western three-piece suit. This man sits in the armchair on the right and watches as twenty or thirty more people ascend the stairs onto the stage. They are all dressed in colorful national or ethnic or religious costumes, Asian in look. Buddhist, one supposes, with lots of white and many splashes of brilliant color. There is a light purple they appear to favor.

They array themselves in a line facing the Dalai Lama, and the American woman who first welcomed them returns to the lectern to explain to the audience that these are representatives of all the Buddhist communities in Asia who regard the Dalai Lama as their spiritual leader. More applause.

Each representative approaches the Dalai Lama in turn, holding a white scarf. With a bow the Dalai Lama takes the scarves, bows again, often touching foreheads with the person who has approached, then puts the scarves around their necks. After a verbal exchange not broadcast to the crowd, the representatives move to one side.

Some are clearly almost overwhelmed by this interaction with the Dalai Lama. They crab toward him, or walk bent in a bow. But the Dalai Lama greets all alike with a big grin and a friendly greeting, and when they leave him they have straightened up and are more relaxed.

The last dignitary to approach is Drepung, in flowing white robes. It takes checking on the big screen to be sure of this. Yes, their Drepung. Joe is jerking up and down in Charlie’s arms, pointing. Nick too is pointing.

The almost stereopticon effect of the two images, one little and three-dimensional, one huge and two-dimensional, creates a kind of hyperreality, a five-dimensional vertigo. On the screen, one can see that under his white ceremonial robes Drepung is still wearing his running shoes, now more enormous than ever. He bounces toward the Dalai Lama with a huge grin on his face, the Dalai Lama matching it watt for watt; they seem to know each other. The Dalai Lama bows as Drepung approaches, Drepung bows, they keep eye contact all the while. They meet and touch foreheads, Drepung bowing lower to make this contact, even though the Dalai Lama is not a small man. The crowd cheers. Many Asians around them are weeping. Drepung hands the Dalai Lama the white scarf he is carrying, and the Dalai Lama touches it to his forehead and puts it around Drepung’s neck, Drepung bowing low to receive it. When that’s done they speak for a bit in Tibetan, laughing at something. The Dalai Lama asks a question, Drepung cocks his head to the side, nods, makes some jest; laughing, the Dalai Lama turns and takes a white scarf from one of his aides standing behind, then gives it to Drepung. Drepung touches it to his forehead, then extends it over the Dalai Lama’s bowed head and places it around his neck. As the Dalai Lama straightens, Drepung flicks one end of the scarf and it lands over the Dalai Lama’s shoulder like a flapper’s boa. The Dalai Lama laughs and vamps for a second, to audience laughter, then gestures Drepung off the stage as if shooing away a fly.

The white-scarved group also leaves the stage. The Dalai Lama sits down in the armchair to the left, across from his compatriot. He puts on a radio microphone that works well, as everyone finds out when he says in a deep voice, “Hello.” Amplification in the arena is clearer than one would have thought possible.

The crowd says hello back. The Dalai Lama kicks off his sandals, leaves them on the carpet and tucks his feet up under his legs, in either a meditation pose or just a comfortable position. Bare arms make it seem he could be cold, but no doubt he is used to it and does not notice. It’s hot outside anyway.

He begins to speak, but in Tibetan. Around his amplified words is silence. The airy whoosh of the building’s ventilation system becomes audible: a surreal disjunction, between the absence of crowd noise and the visible presence of thirteen thousand people. All quiet, all listening intently to a man speaking a language they don’t know.

Low sonorous Tibetan, unlike the sound of Chinese, or the other east Asian languages. Yes, he sounds like Rudra Cakrin. Then he pauses, and the man in the other armchair speaks in English. Ah, the translator. Presumably he is summarizing what the Dalai Lama just said. Another good headset microphone. Voices booming out of the giant black scoreboard console hanging over center court.

The translator finishes translating what was apparently an entirely conventional welcome, and the Dalai Lama starts again in Tibetan. This is going to be a long affair. Then all of a sudden the Dalai Lama switches to English. “I hope we can talk about all this in the rest of our time together. How to live in this world. How to achieve peace and balance.”

His English is perfectly clear. He jokes about his inability in it, and from time to time he dives back into Tibetan, apparently to be sure of being accurate about important things. Possibly even here his attempt in English would be more interesting than the translator’s more expert locutions. In any case, back and forth between languages they bounce, both getting some laughs.

The Dalai Lama talks about the situation they find themselves in, “a difficult moment in history” as he calls it, acknowledging this truth with a shrug. Reality is not easy; as a Tibetan this has been evident all his life; and yet all the more reason not to despair, or even to lose one’s peace of mind. One has to focus on what one can do oneself, and then do that, he says. He says, “We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself, and help others share that peace. If you contribute to other people’s happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life.”

He sounds so much like Rudra Cakrin. Suddenly it’s hard to believe that such an idiosyncratic mind as Rudra Cakrin’s can be gone. Many of the people here presumably do not believe it. The man speaking is agreed to be the fourteenth reincarnation of a particular mind or soul. Although in an interview published that morning in the Post, the Dalai Lama was asked when he had first recalled his previous lives, and he replied, “I have never had that experience,” and then added, “I am an ordinary human being.” He did not even make any particular claim to special knowledge, or expertise in anything metaphysical.

Now he says, “What happens beyond our senses we cannot know. All we can see indicates that everything is transitory.”

This is not the kind of thing a religious leader is expected to say—admissions of ignorance, jokes about translation error. The whole situation feels nonreligious, more like a fireside chat than the Sermon on the Mount. Maybe the Sermon on the Mount would have felt like that too.

“Knowledge is important, but much more important is the use toward which it is put. This depends on the heart and mind of the one who uses it.”

It’s the argument for always-generous. Even if you only manage to love your own DNA, it exists in a diffuse extension through the biosphere. All the eukaryotes share the basic genes; all life is one. If you love yourself, or just want to survive—or maybe those are the same thing—then the love has to diffuse out into everything, just to be accurate.

To love accurately. The Dalai Lama says something about mindful consumption. We eat the world the way we breathe it. Thanks must be given, devotion must be given. One must pay attention, to do what is right for life.

These were all the things a sociobiologist would recommend, if he could talk about what ought to be as well as what is. Buddhism as the Dalai Lama’s science; science as the scientist’s Buddhism. Again, as when Rudra Cakrin gave his lecture at NSF, it all becomes clear.

Time passes in a flow of ideas. A couple of hours, in fact; no concessions to any suppposedly short attention spans. And the crowd is still silent and attentive. The time has gone fast somehow, and now the Dalai Lama is winding things up by answering a few questions submitted by e-mail, read by his translator from a printout.

“Last question, Rebecca Sampson, fifth grade: Why does China want Tibet so bad?”

Nervous titter from the crowd.

The Dalai Lama tilts his head to the side. “Tibet is very beautiful,” he says, in a way that makes everyone laugh. A certain tension dissipates. “Tibet has a lot of forests. Animals, minerals—not so many vegetables.” Another surprised laugh, rustling unamplifed through the arena like wind in the trees.

“Most of all, Tibet has room. China is a big country, but it has a lot of people. Too many people for them to care for on their own land, over the long term. And Tibet is at the roof of Asia. When you are in Tibet, no one can attack you from above! So, there are these strategic reasons. But most of them, when examined, are not very important. And I see signs that the Chinese are beginning to realize that. There are ways of accommodating everybody’s desires, and so I see some progress on this matter. They are willing to talk now. It will all come in time.”

Soon after that they are done. Everyone is standing and clapping. A moment of union. Thirteen thousand human beings, all thankful at once.

Say good-bye to the Quiblers. Wander with the crowd, disoriented, uncaring; it doesn’t matter where you leave the building. Just get outside and figure out then where you are.

Outside. Westward on H Street. Quickly separate from the crowd that has witnessed together such an event: back among the strangers of the city. No more union. Over to G Street and west, past the White House with its fence, past the ugly Old Executive Offices, don’t turn in there to work. Just look. Think about the place from the outside. From the Dalai Lama’s point of view. Why had the Dalai Lama given Drepung a scarf to bless and put around his own neck? He hadn’t done that with anyone else. Must ask Drepung. Some kind of power.

What was it the Dalai Lama said about compassion?

The words are gone, the feeling remains. Did he really use the word oxytocin, did he really say positron emission topography, laughing with the translator as he mangled the phrase? What just happened?

One can always just walk away. The Dalai Lama had said that for sure. Things you don’t like, things you think are wrong, you can always just walk away. You will be happier. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. But compassion is not just a feeling. You have to act.

-

HOMELESS NIGHTS IN THE CITY. Slip out the security gate at sunset and off the grid, into the interstices, following the older system of paths and alleys and rail beds that web the urban forest like animal trails. Join the ferals living outdoors, in the wind.

Frank worked from dawn until sunset on weekdays. The rest of the time he wandered the streets and the parks and the cafes. He turned in his van to the Honda place in Arlington, then paid cash to one of the fregans for a VW van with a burnt-out engine, and got Spencer to sign the papers to take ownership of it. He slept in it while he and Spencer and Robin and Robert worked at replacing its engine. It turned out Robin and Robert had VW experience, and they did not mind sitting around in a driveway after a run, fingering over a pile of parts. Apparently this was a recognized form of post-frisbee entertainment.

“The VW engine is the last piece of technology humans could actually understand. You look under the hood of a new car, it’s like whoah.”

“I lived in one of these for three years.”

“I lost my virginity in one of these.”

General laughter. Spencer sang, “I would fight for hippie chicks, I would die for hippie chicks!”

“See if you can get the fan belt slipped over that there now.”

If that was true, then all should be well. He should be very high indeed.

Decision was a feeling. In the morning he woke up in the back of the VW van, and saw his Acheulian hand axe up there on the dashboard, and his whole life and identity leaped to him, as solid as that chunk of quartzite. Awake at dawn: now was the time to eat a little breakfast bar, read a little Emerson. So he did. No pressure there, impeding his progress through time; he flowed with perfect equanimity. “To hazard the contradiction—freedom is necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting.”

And so it did. With a sure hand he opened the door on the day.

He got rid of his cell phone. He stopped using credit cards or checks; he got cash from the ATM in the office and he did all his e-mail there. He kept his FOG phone, but did not use it. He left the system of signs.

Most of his waking hours he was working at the Old Executive Offices. While the VW van was still stationary, when he had an hour, he took the Metro out to Ballston to see Drepung and some of the other Khembalis at their office in the NSF building. Sometimes he walked from there out to the embassy house in Arlington. Once he looked in the garden shed.

When they got the VW van running (it sounded like Laurel and Hardy’s black truck) he also added visits to the farm, to see the gang, and help out in the big garden there. He never stayed long.

At the office he started working with a team from the OMB on funding proposals. They had done some macrocalculations for strategic planning purposes, and it turned out they could swap out the electricity-generating infrastructure for about three hundred billion dollars—an astonishing bargain, as one OMB guy put it. Stabilizing sea level might cost more, because the amount of water involved was simply staggering. Sustainable ag, on the other hand, was only expensive in terms of labor. If it wasn’t going to be fossil fueled, it was going to be much more labor intensive. They needed more farmers, they needed intensive management grass-range ranchers. In other words they needed more cowboys, incredible though that seemed. It was suggestive, when one thought of the federal lands in the American West, and public employment possibilities. The emptying high plains—you could repopulate a region where too few people meant the end of town after town. Landscape restoration—habitat—buffalo biome—wolves and bears. Grizzly bears. Cost, about fifty billion dollars. These are such bargains! the OMB guy kept exclaiming. It doesn’t take that much to prime the pump! Who knew?

A little before sunset, unless something was absolutely pressing, Frank would leave the Old Executive Offices and the security compound, and take off into the streets. Check for tails, sprint at a few strategic moments down little cross streets, to test those behind; no one could follow him without him seeing it. Sometimes he then took the Metro up to the Zoo; sometimes he walked all the way. It was only two miles, about thirty minutes’ hiking. When traffic was bad the drive wouldn’t be that much faster. The city felt larger than it was because when in cars there were so many delays and turns and buildings; and when walking, the distances took a bit too long. At a running pace you saw how compact it was.

Run off the map and into the forest. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

That was it exactly; to the brink of fear. It filled you up. The wind in your face. These Concord guys! That America’s first great thinkers had been raving nature mystics was not accident, but inevitable. The land had spoken through them. They had lived outdoors in the great stony forest of New England, with its Himalayan weather. The blue of the sky, the abyss of fear behind things. A day out on the river, skinny-dipping with Ellery Channing.

One evening as he hiked past Site 21 he saw that the old gang was back, looking as if they had never been away.

“Zeno, Fedpage, Andy, Cutter!”

“Hey there! Doctor Blood! Where you been?”

“How are you guys, where you been?”

“We haven’t been anywhere,” Zeno declared.

“What!” Frank cried. “You haven’t been here!”

Cutter waved a hand at two of his city park friends, sitting at the table with him. “Out and about, you know.”

Andy yelled, “What do you mean where you been? Where you been?”

“I’ve been staying with some friends,” Frank said.

“Yeah well—us too,” Zeno growled.

“Any sight of Chessman?”

“No.” And stupid of you to ask.

“Are you still doing stuff with FOG?”

“With FOG! Are you kidding?”

They told him about it all together, Zeno prevailing in the end: “—and Fedpage is still pissed off at them!”

“He sure has bad luck with that federal government.”

“You mean they have bad luck with him! He’s a Jonah!”

“I am not a Jonah! I’m just the only one who looks up my rights in the personnel policies and then sticks up for them.”

“You need to be more ignorant,” Zeno instructed.

“I do! I’ve got to stop reading all this shit, but I can’t.” Fedpage was reading the Post as he said this, so the others laughed at him.

Actually, it transpired, he was still doing some work with FOG, despite his beef with them, helping Nancy to organize chipping expeditions to tag more animals. To no one’s surprise, the bros had liked being given little dart guns, which shot chipped darts the size of BBs; and they liked their big hunts, when they went out in beater lines to shoot all the remaining unchipped animals they could find.

“The problem,” Zeno told Frank, “is that half these animals are already chipped, and we aren’t supposed to plunk them twice, but it’s so tempting once you’ve got one in your sights.”

“So you shoot anyway?”

“No, we start shooting each other!” Triumphant laughter at this. “It’s like those paintball wars. Andy must have ten chips in him by now.”

“That’s only ’cause he shot so many people first!”

“Now there are surveillance screens in this city where he is like twelve people in one spot.”

“He’s a jury!”

“So don’t you be trying to send us on no more secret spy missions,” Andy told Frank. “We’re all lit up like Christmas trees.”

“Protective coloration,” Frank suggested. “I should pass through you guys every night.”

“Don’t do that,” Zeno warned. “We take this opportunity to say no to Dr. No.”

“Yeah well, sorry about that guys, I meant to thank you and I know it was a long time ago now, but whenever I came out here you guys weren’t here, so I didn’t know.”

“We’ve been around,” Zeno said.

A silence stretched, and Frank sat on his old bench. “Why are you pissed off at FOG?” he asked Fedpage. “How exactly did you get bogarted by the evil Big Brother that is Friends of the National Zoo?”

“The Department of Parkland Security, you mean? Look, all I was saying was that we were doing regular national-park work on a volunteer basis, and that made us subject to federal liability, which means we have to sign their stipulated waivers or else the NPS would be left liable for any accidents, whereas with the waivers it would fall on Interior’s general personnel funds, which is where you would want it if you wanted any timely compensation! But what do I know?”

Zeno said, “So get on that, Blood. We want that fixed.”

“Okay. Well hey guys, I was just passing through on my way to meet the frisbees, I’m going to go join them. But it’s good to see you. I’ll drop on by again. I’m doing some sunset counts for FOG, and dawn patrols too, so I’ll be around. Are folks hanging here much now?”

No replies, as usual. The bros never much on discussing plans.

“Well, I’ll see you if I see you,” Frank said.

“I’ll join you for a FOG walk,” Fedpage said darkly. “You need to hear the whole story about them.”

That day’s sunset was now gilding the autumn forest’s dull yellows and browns. Leaves covered the surrounding hillsides to ankle depth everywhere they could see. Cutter gestured at the view with the can of beer in his hand: “Ain’t it pretty? All these leaves, and nobody’s gonna have to leaf-blow them away.”

Fedpage did join him on a dawn patrol one morning, massaging his face to wake up. The two of them wandered slowly up the ravine, peering through the trees, pinging animals they saw with their FOG RFID readers. Fedpage talked under his breath most of the time. Perhaps obsessive-compulsive, with huge systems in his mind which made better sense to him than he could convey to other people. He was not unlike Anna in this intense regard for systems, but did not have Anna’s ability to assign them their proper importance, to prioritize and see a path through a pattern, which was what made Anna so good at NSF. Without that component, or even radically lacking in it, Fedpage was living on the street and crying in his beer, always going on about lost battles over semihallucinated bureaucratic trivia. An excess of reason itself a form of madness, indeed.

You needed it all working. Otherwise things got strange. Indecisiveness was a kind of vertigo in time, a loss of balance in one’s sense of movement into the future. When you weren’t actually in the state it was hard to remember how it had felt. “Forever wells up the impulse of choosing. ” So it might seem, when all was well.

He and Fedpage came on an old man, comatose in his layby—blue-skinned, clearly in distress. The two of them kneeled over him, trying to determine if he was still alive, calling Nancy and 911 both, then wondering whether they should try to carry him out to Broad Branch Road, or instead wait where they were and be the ping for the rescue team. Fedpage babbled angrily about poor response time averages while Frank sat there wishing he knew more about medical matters, resolving (yet again) to at least take a CPR course.

He said this to Fedpage and Fedpage snorted. “Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.”

Bill Murray, trying to help a stricken homeless guy. Yet another truth from that movie so full of them; if you really wanted to help other people you would have to devote years of your life to learning how.

He tried to express this to Fedpage, just to pass the time congealing around them. Fedpage nodded as he listened to the stricken man’s stertorous breathing. “Maybe it’s just sleep apnea we got here. What a great fucking movie. Me and Zeno were arguing about how many years that day had to go on for Bill Murray. I said it couldn’t be less than ten years, because of the piano lessons and the med school and the, you know,” and he was off on a long list of all of the character’s accomplishments and how many hours it would take to learn these skills, and how much time he had had for them in any given version of the repeated day. “Also, when you think about it, if Bill Murray can do different things every day, and get a different response from the people around him, just how exactly is that different from any ordinary day? It ain’t any different, that’s what! Other people don’t remember what you did the day before, they don’t give a shit, they’ve got their own day to deal with! So in essence we’re all living our own Groundhog Day, right? Every day is always just the same fucking day.”

“You should be a Buddhist,” Frank said. “You should talk to my Buddhist friends.”

“Yeah right. I don’t go in for that hippie shit.”

“It’s not hippie shit.”

“Yeah it is. How would you know.”

“I talk to them is how I know. I lived with them.”

“Oh. Well. That explains it then. But it also proves my point about them being hippies. I mean you don’t just live with people, do you.”

All while the old man cradled between them gasped, or did not gasp. Eventually the rescue team arrived, and under a blistering critique from Fedpage they got the old guy out to their ambulance. There Fedpage tried to grill them on the paperwork the operation would require of all involved, but the meds waved him away and drove off.

Talking to Fedpage was like talking to Rudra Cakrin. Frank knew some strange people. Some of these people had problems.

None more so, for instance, than the blond woman from the park. Frank saw her again, one evening at Site 21 when some of them were there, and he said “Hi,” and sat down next to her to ask how she was doing.

“Oh—day eighteen,” she said, with a wry look.

Frank said, “Well. Eighteen’s better than none.”

“That’s true.”

“But, you know, after all this time, I still don’t think we’ve ever been introduced. I’m Frank Vanderwal.” He stuck out a hand, which she took and shook daintily, with her fingertips.

“Deirdre. Nice to meetcha, ha ha.”

“Yeah, the bros aren’t much on introductions. Hey Deirdre—any sign of Chessman?”

“No, I ain’t seen him. I’m sure he’s moved.”

And on from there. She was happy to talk. Lots happened when you were homeless. It was starting to get cold again. She was staying at the UDC shelter again. The whole gang had spent most of the summer there, or over at the feral camp in Klingle Park. Lots of people were going feral in Northwest—hundreds—it made it safer in some ways, more dangerous in others. It could be fun; it could be too fun.

“Have you ever looked into that house on Linnean?”

“Yeah, I think I know the one you mean. Bunch of kids. They don’t want old drunk ladies there.”

“Oh I don’t know. They seemed friendly to me. All kinds of people. I think you’d be fine with them.”

“I don’t know. They drink a lot.”

“Who doesn’t?” Frank said, which made her laugh her nicotine laugh. “Well, maybe one of those church outreach groups,” he added, “if that’s what you’re looking for. There wouldn’t be any drinking there.”

“Okay okay, maybe I better check out the kids after all!”

The next morning, Emerson:

“Yesterday night, at fifteen minutes after eight, my little Waldo ended his life.”

Only son. Scarlet fever. Six years old.

Frank wandered the streets of the city. Strange to feel so bad for a man long dead. Reading all the ecstatic sentences one could conclude Emerson had been some kind of space cadet, soaring through some untroubled space cadet life. But it wasn’t so. “To be out of the war, out of debt, out of the drought, out of the blues, out of the dentist’s hands, out of the second thoughts, mortifications, and remorses that inflict such twinges and shooting pains—out of the next winter, and the high prices, and company below your ambition…” This was the world they all lived in. He had loved a world where death could strike down anyone at any time. A young wife—a treasured friend—even his own boy. A boy like Nick or Joe. And it was still like that now. The odds had been improved, but nothing was certain. Surgeons had drained a blood clot on his brain. Without science he would have died, or been one of those mysterious people who always fucked up, who could not conduct their lives properly. All from a pop on the nose.

Whereas now, on the other hand, he was wandering the streets of Washington, D.C., a homeless person working at the White House with burnt-out Vietnam vets for friends and a spook girlfriend he did not know how to find! Miracles of modern medicine! Well, not all of that was his fault. Some kind of fate. Followed step by step it had all made sense. It was just a situation. It could be dealt with. It could be surfed. All his people were alive, after all—except Rudra Cakrin—and there he did what he could to keep him alive in his thoughts. Rudra would have said this, Rudra would have thought that. Good idea!

Up 19th Street to Dupont and then Connecticut, into his neighborhood of restaurants, bookstores, the laundromat by UDC. Certain neighborhoods became one’s own, while the great bulk of the city remained no more than various terrain to be traversed. Only a few city dwellers had London-taxi-driver knowledge of their city. He followed his routes in the great metropolis.

He seldom went to the Optimodal that Diane had found on New York Avenue. It was one of his known places when not at work, and thus to be avoided. It meant he didn’t see Diane then, which was too bad, but they still did their lunch walks on most days. She was getting frustrated at the many ways things could bog down.

He went to the drop spot under the tree again, and found undisturbed the last note he had left for Caroline. He crumpled it up, left another one.

He left it and walked away.

The following week, only that note was there.

He stood there in the knot of trees. Carved into the trunk of one was a simple figure, like a cross between Kilroy and Kokopelli. The shaman, looking out at him. Autumn forest, brassy in the afternoon light. Where was she, what was she doing? Even without a clot on the brain one could feel baffled. Right here they had lain kissing. Two creatures huddled together. Something was keeping her from making the drop.

The Air Intelligence Agency. Army Intelligence and Security Command. Central Intelligence Agency. National Clandestine Service. Coast Guard Intelligence. Defense Intelligence Agency. Office of Intelligence, Department of Energy (really?). Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State. Office of Intelligence Support, Department of the Treasury. National Security Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate. Marine Corps Intelligence Activity. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. National Intelligence Council. National Reconnaissance Office. National Security Agency. Office of Naval Intelligence. United States Secret Service.

The Covert Action Staff. The Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The Directorate of Operations. Drug Enforcement Administration. Office of National Security Intelligence.

The United States Intelligence Community (a cooperative federation).

Out on his run with Edgardo the next day, he said, “Are there really as many intelligence agencies as they say there are?”

“No.” Pause for a beat. “There are more.”

“Shit.” Slowly, haltingly, Frank told him about the situation with Caroline and the dead drop. “She said she would use it. So I’m worried. I feel helpless.”

They ran on in silence from the Washington Monument to the Capitol, and then back to the Washington Monument again; an unprecedented span of silence in Frank’s experience of running with Edgardo. He waited curiously.

Finally Edgardo said, “You should consider that maybe she is out of town. That maybe she is involved in the effort to deal with these guys, and so has to stay away.”

“Ah.”

It was like taking a pressure off the brain.

Thoreau said, “I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.”

Oooooooop! And the gibbon chorus at dawn? It represented joy. It was saying I’m alive. Bert still started it every morning he was out in the enclosure at dawn. May too was an enthusiast. Sleeping in his VW van parked on Linnean, he could start each day joining the chorus at the zoo. It was the best way possible to start the day.

“While the man that killed my lynx (and many others) thinks it came out of a menagerie, and the naturalists call it the Canada lynx, and at the White Mountains they call it the Siberian lynx—in each case forgetting, or ignoring, that it belongs here—I call it the Concord lynx.”

There were no lynxes in Massachusetts now.

But the Rock Creek hominid persisted. Oooop! One could follow Rock Creek from the Potomac all the way up to the zoo, with a few little detours. North of that came the beaver pond, and then Site 21. Back out to Connecticut, to an early dinner, pay with cash on the check, big tip, so easy; off again into the park.

There he ran into Spencer and Robert and Robin, as planned; hugs all around. They were an affectionate group. Sling the friz, running and hooting through the dim yellow world, quickly working up a sweat. The flight of startled deer, their eponymous tails. Stand around afterward, feeling the blood bump through the body.

The autumn colors in Rock Creek were not like those in New England, they were more muted, more various—not Norman Rockwell, but Cezanne—or, as Diane suggested when Frank put it that way to her, Vuillard.

Vuillard? he asked.

She took him on a lunch break back to the Mellon room at the National Gallery. Eating hot dogs sitting on the steps, and then going in to examine the subtle little mud-toned canvases of Vuillard. Wandering side by side, arms bumping, heads together. Was that tan or umber or what. Imagine his palette at the end of the day. Like something the cat threw up.

She too was affectionate. She took his arm to propel him along. “So how does your head feel today?” she would ask.

“About the same as yesterday.”

She squeezed his arm. “I don’t ask every day. Are you still feeling better?”

“I am. You know, Yann’s doing some amazing things out there in San Diego.” It probably sounded like a change of subject, but it wasn’t.

“Yeah, like what?”

“Well, I think they’ve worked out how to get their DNA modifications into human bodies. The insertion problem may have been solved, and if that happens, all kinds of things might follow. Gene therapies, you know.”

“Wow. Nice to think that something’s going right.”

“Indeed.”

“It would be ironic to think that just as we were inventing real health care we burned the planet down instead.”

He laughed.

“Don’t laugh or I’ll bleed on you,” she said dourly, quoting him from the time of his accident. She too had lost someone young, he remembered; her husband had died of cancer in what must have been his forties or fifties. “So,” she persisted, “have you got the feeling in your nose back?”

“No.”

“Maybe they’ll learn to regrow nerves.”

“I think they may. There are some angles converging on that one.”

“Cool.” She sighed.

“I’ve gotta get back,” Frank said. “I’ve got a call time in with Anna, to talk about coordinating all her Fix-it agencies into the mission architecture, you should drop in on that.”

“Okay I will.” And as they started back: “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

Mostly he left the VW van in a driveway behind the feral potluck house on Linnean. If he drove it at all, mostly out to the farm, he checked it thoroughly first. Dry cleaning, Edgardo called it. It always proved free of all chips, tags, and transponders. Easy to believe when you looked at it: VW vans as a class were getting kind of old and skanky. But what a fine house. And sitting in the curved vinyl seat at night, reading his laptop on the curved little table, Thoreau seemed to second the thought:

He had understood entirely. Put such a box in a tree, and you had your treetop view as well. Put the box in a book and you had Walden. Put the box on wheels and you had your VW van. Frank printed the passage out and stuck it on the wall the next time he was at the fregan potluck. They too had found the key. He ate with them about three nights a week, all over Northwest, in house after house. There were feral subcultures: there was a farmers’ market wing, and a hunters’ crowd, and dumpster purists, and many other ways of going feral in the city.

At work Frank was making wonderful strides with the guy from OMB who was administering the Fix-it program that Anna had rediscovered. His name too was Henry, and he worked with Roy and Andrea and the rest of the White House brain trust. Right now, he and Frank were teaming up on the clean-energy part of the mission architecture. The Navy had made an agreement with the Navajo nation to build and run a prototype nuclear power plant that would reuse fuel rods and was overengineered for safety. Meanwhile Southern California Edison had agreed to build a dozen more Stirling heat engine solar-power generators, for themselves and other energy companies around the American West, and for some federal plants that were going to be built on BLM land, using a federal grant program. SCE had also won the contract to build the first big generation of fully clean coal plants, which would capture both the particulates and the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on firing, so that all they would be releasing from the pipe was steam. The first plants were to be built in Oklahoma, and the CO₂ collected in the process was to be injected into nearby depleted oil wells. Oil wells nearby that were still working would look to see if they got any uptick in pressure differentials, making for a complete systems test.

“Sweet,” the OMB Henry commented. He was about thirty, it seemed to Frank, utterly fresh and determined. He was unfazed by the past, even unaware of it. The defeats and obstructions, the nightmarish beginning to the century, so balked and stupidified; none of that meant a thing to him. And Washington had hundreds of these kids ready to rip. The world was full of them. He said, “That’s a good big subunit of the whole mission architecture, up and running.”

“True,” Frank said. “I think the question now is how quick we can ramp production up to what we need.”

“I wonder how much investment capital is out there. Or whether trained labor will be the real shortage.”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“That’s a good thought.” And young Henry grinned.

Evening in the park, and Frank buzzed Spencer and joined him and Robin and Robert at a new fregan house. East, into a neighborhood he had never been in before, a kind of border between gentrification and urban decay, in which burned or boarded-up buildings stood mutely between renovated towers guarded by private security people. An awkward mix it seemed, and yet once inside the boarded-up shell of a brownstone, it proved to be as sheltered from the public life of the city as any other place. Home was where the food was.

Same crowd as always, a mix of young and old. Neo-hippie and postpunk. Some new thing that Frank couldn’t name with a media label. The fregan way. Mix of races, ethnicities, modes of operation. A potluck indeed. It was like this every night in so many different places around Northwest. What was happening in Washington, D.C.? What was happening anywhere else, everywhere else? No one could be sure. The media was a concocted product, reporting only a small fraction of the culture. What would they do for a sense of the zeitgeist when the culture had fractalized and the media become not a mirror, but one artifact among many? Had it ever been any different? Was this somehow new? If people walked away from the old mass culture of mass consumption, and everybody did something homegrown, what would that look like?

“How many fregan houses are there altogether, do you suppose?” Frank asked Spencer as they sat on the floor over their plates.

Spencer shrugged. “Lots I guess.”

“How do you choose which to go to?”

“Friends spread the word. I generally know by five, or Robert.”

“Not Robin?”

“Robin usually just goes where we go. You know Robin. He barely knows what city we’re in.”

“What planet is this?” Robin asked from behind them.

“See? He doesn’t want to be distracted with irrelevancies. Anyway, you can always call me.”

“I only have my FOG phone now,” Frank said. “And even that I’m trying not to use too much. I want to stay off the grid when I’m not at work.”

“I know,” Spencer said as he chewed, glancing at Frank speculatively. He swallowed. “I should tell you, no one can guarantee this group doesn’t have all the various kinds of informants in it. You know. It’s loose at the edges, and law enforcement is kind of nervous about the feral concept. I’ve heard there are people taking money from the FBI just to make some bucks, and they tell them all sorts of things.”

“Of course.” Frank looked around. No one looked like an informant.

Spencer went back to wolfing down his meal. There was a big crowd tonight and there wasn’t going to be quite enough food. At the start of every potluck they had all started to say a little thanksgiving. In most houses, they all said together, “Enough is as good as a feast,” sometimes repeating it three or four times. Maybe that was the third great correlation, enough and happiness. Or maybe it was science and Buddhism. Or compassion and action. No, these were too general. It was still out there.

Some of Spencer’s friends sat down, and he introduced them to Frank, and Frank leaned forward squinting, repeating their names. He joined their chat about the windy autumn, the park, the cops, feral gossip. Apparently this group was going back over west of Connecticut the next night.

“Do you ever see the jaguar?” Frank asked them.

“Yeah, I saw it once I think, but it was at night you know.”

The young women were happy to have Spencer’s attention. Frank was regarded by them in the same way they regarded the other older single males in the room, meaning a bit distantly if at all.

Eventually Frank left. His treehouse had been nearby. Long walk down Piney Branch Parkway to his VW van, sleep on that nice mattress, cold breeze flowing down the window at the back of the pop-up.

Thus the feral life, the most extreme set of habits Frank had lived so far. A life on foot, hand to mouth, among friends and strangers. Maybe this was how people lived, no matter what. He googled to see if any studies had been done to determine how quickly new habits were internalized as a norm. Every Wednesday he went by the dead drop and found his note from the week before. It was disturbing, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to remember what Edgardo had said about that, and trust that he had been conveying to him the actual facts of the situation, rather than merely speculating. He had made it clear enough. Time to refocus on the moment. Ride the wave.

-

ONE DAY SPENCER CALLED FRANK on his FOG phone.

“Hey Frank, did you check out your Emerson for the day?”

Frank had everyone reading it now: Diane, Spencer, Robin; even Edgardo, who only rolled his eyes and questioned the intelligence of any optimist. “No,” he said now to Spencer.

“Well here, listen to it. ‘I remember well the foreign scholar who made a week of my youth happy by his visit. “The savages in the islands,” he said, “delight to play with the surf, coming in on the top of the rollers, then swimming out again, and repeat the delicious maneuver for hours.” Well, human life is made up of such transits.’—Did you hear that, Frank?”

“Yes.”

“Ralph Waldo Emerson, saying that life is like surfing? Is that great or what?”

“Yes, that’s pretty great. That’s our man.”

“Who was this guy? Do you think somebody’s making all these quotes up?”

“No, I think Emerson made them up.”

“It’s so perfect. He’s like your Dalai Lama.”

“That’s very true.”

“The Waldo Lama. He’s like the great shaman of the forest.”

“It’s true, he is. Although even more so his buddy Thoreau, when it comes to the actual forest.”

“Yeah that’s right. Your treehouse guru. The man in the box. They are teaching you, baby!”

“You’re teaching me.”

“Yes I am. Well okay then, bro, surf your way up here and we’ll tee off at around five.”

“Okay, I’ll try to be there.”

In all the wandering, work was his anchor, his norming function. The only thing that was the same every day. These days he put in his hours focusing on the many problems cropping up as they tried to convince all the relevant agencies and institutions to act on their various parts of the mission architecture. They were also obtaining UN and national approvals for the sea water relocation projects. Holland was taking the lead here, also England, and really most countries wanted the stabilization, so the will was there, but problems were endless. The war of the agencies had gone incandescent in certain zones, and was coming to a kind of climax of the moment, as resistance to Diane’s mission architecture and the Fix-it coordinating efforts flared up in the Treasury Department and Interior and Commerce, big agencies all.

The technical issues in powering a massive relocation of sea water were becoming more and more naked to them. They mostly involved matters of scale or sheer number. Floating platforms like giant rafts could be anchored next to a coastline, and they could move about, they did not have to have a fixed location. Pumps were straightforward, although they had never wanted pumps so large and powerful before. Pipelines could be adapted from the oil and gas industry, although they wanted much bigger pipes if they could power them. Power remained the biggest concern, but if the rafts held an array of solar panels big enough, then they could be autonomous units, floating wherever they wanted them. Pipelines in the northern hemisphere had to be run overland to the playas they wanted to fill. China and Morocco and Mauritania had been the first to agree to run prototype systems, and other countries in central Asia had jumped on board.

Down in Antarctica, they could set them anywhere around the big eastern half of the continent, and run heated pipelines up to the polar plateau, where several depressions would serve as catchment basins. Cold made things more complicated down there technologically, but politically it was infinitely easier. SCAR, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, had approved the idea of the project, and they were as close to a government as Antarctica had, as the Antarctic Treaty signatory nations never met, and never kept to the treaty’s rules whether they met or not. In many senses NSF was the true government of Antarctica, and the relevant people at NSF were good to go. They saw the need. Saving the world so science could proceed: the Frank Principle was standard operating procedure at NSF. It went without saying.

After another long day at work, about a week later, Diane asked whether he wanted to get something to eat, and he said of course.

At dinner in a restaurant on Vermont Avenue she talked about work things that were bothering her, especially the tendency for innovation to bog in groups of more than a few people, which she called reversion to the norm. Frank laughed at that, thinking it would be a good joke to share with Edgardo. He ate his dinner and watched her talking. From time to time he nodded, asked questions, made comments.

Phil Chase was too busy with other things to give much time to their issues, and he was having trouble getting legislation and funding through Congress. Access to him was controlled by Roy Anastophoulus and Andrea Blackwell, and while they said he remained interested in climate and science, he was still going to trust Diane and the agencies to do their jobs, while he focused on his, which ranged all across the board; his time was precious. Not easy to get any of it, or even to contact him properly. Get on with it, they seemed to be saying. Diane wasn’t pleased with their priorities. She asked Frank if he would mind asking Charlie to ask Roy to ask Chase about certain things more directly; she laughed as she said this. Frank smiled and nodded. He would talk to Charlie. He thought word could get passed along. Maybe in Washington, D.C., he suggested, six degrees of separation was not the maximum separating any two people, but the minimum. Diane laughed again. Frank watched her laugh, and oceans of clouds filled him.

-

ANNA QUIBLER HAD BEEN RESEARCHING the situation in China, and she found it troubling. Their State Environmental Protection Administration had Environmental Protection Bureaus, and environmental laws were on the books. There were even some nongovernmental organizations working to keep the crowded country’s landscape clean. But the government in Beijing had given power for economic development to local governments, and these were evaluated by Beijing for their economic growth only, so laws were ignored and there was nobody who had a good handle on the total situation. It sounded a little familiar, but in China things were amplified and accelerated. Now an NGO called Han Hai Sha (Boundless Ocean of Sand) was sending reports to the division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that coordinated or at least collated the information for all the Chinese environmental studies that were being done. For a country of that size, there weren’t very many of them. In theory the Academy division was an advisory body, but the Communist Party political command made all the decisions, so the environmental scientists made their reports and had included advice, but as far as Anna’s contacts could tell, few major decisions resulting from their advice had ever been made.

Facilitating rapid economic growth had been the ruling principle in Beijing for three decades now, and with a billion people on about as much land as Brazil or the United States, unleashing this engine of human activity had left little room for considerations of landscape. The list of environmental problems the Chinese scientists had gathered was large, but Anna’s contact, a Professor Fengzhen Bao, was now writing to her from an e-mail account in Australia, and he was saying that the big areas in the west that had been militarized were going unstudied and unreported. Except for evidence from the windstorms of loess that blew east, they had little to analyze and were not sure what was happening out there. They knew the government had agreed to fill the Tarim Basin, the major dry playa in the Takla Makan, with sea water pumped up from the China Sea, but that was not their worry; indeed some thought it might even help, by covering some of the toxic dustbeds being torn open by the hot strong winds now sweeping the drought-stricken country so frequently. It was the impact of all the other economic activity that was the danger, including strip-mining, coal power generation, deforestation, urbanization of river valleys, cement production and steel manufacturing, and use of dangerous pesticides banned elsewhere. All these factors were combining downstream, in the eastern half of the country, impacting the big river valleys and the coasts, and the many megacities that were covering what farmland they had. Fengzhen said many were seeing signs of a disaster unfolding.

Cumulative impacts, Anna thought with a sigh. That was one of the most complex and vexing subjects in her own world of biostatistics. And the Chinese problem was an exercise in macrobiostatistics. What Anna’s correspondent Fengzhen talked about in his e-mails was what he called a “general system crash,” and he spoke of indicator species already extinct, and other signs that such a crash might be in its early stages. It was a theory he was working on. He compared the Chinese river valleys’ situation to that of the coral reefs, which had all died in about five years.

Anna read this and swallowed hard. She wrote back asking if he and his colleagues could identify the worst two or three impacts they were seeing, their causes and possible mitigations, and clicked send with a sinking feeling. NSF had an international component wherein U.S. scientists teamed with foreign scientists on shared projects, and the infrastructure obtained for these grants remained for the use of the foreign teams when the grants were over. A good idea; but it didn’t look like it was going to be adequate for dealing with this one.

Early one Saturday morning, Charlie met Frank and Drepung on the Potomac, at the little dock by the boathouse at the mouth of Rock Creek, and they put their kayaks in the water just after dawn, the sun like an orange floating on the water. They stroked upstream on the Maryland side, looking into the trees to see if there were any animals still out. Then across the copper sheen to the Virginia side, to check out a strange concrete outfall there. “That’s where I used to bring Rudra Cakrin,” Frank said, pointing at the little overlook at Windy Run.

Then he stroked ahead, smooth and splashless. He was not much more talkative here than he had been in the Sierras, mostly looking around, paddling silently ahead.

On this morning, his habits suited Charlie’s purposes. Charlie slowed in Frank’s wake, and soon he and Drepung were a good distance behind, and working a little to keep up.

“Drepung?”

“Yes, Charlie?”

“I wanted to ask you something about Joe.”

“Yes?”

“Well…I’m wondering how you would characterize what’s going on in him now, after the…ceremony that you and Rudra conducted last year.”

Drepung’s brow furrowed over his sunglasses. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Well—some I don’t know, some sort of spirit was expelled?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Well,” Charlie said. He took a deep breath. “I want it to come back.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want my Joe back. I want whoever he was before the ceremony to come back. That’s the real Joe. I’ve come to realize that. I was wrong to ask you to do anything to him. Whatever he was before, that was him. You know?”

“I’m not sure. Are you saying that he’s changed?”

“Yes! Of course that’s what I’m saying! Because he has changed! And I didn’t realize…I didn’t know that it took all of him, even the parts that—that I don’t know, to make him what he is. I was being selfish, I guess, just because he was so much work. I rationalized that it wasn’t him and that it was making him unhappy, but it was him, and he wasn’t unhappy at all. It’s now that he seems kind of unhappy, actually. Or maybe just not himself. I mean he’s easier than before, but he doesn’t seem to be as interested in things. He doesn’t have the same spark. I mean…what was it that you drove out of him, anyway?”

Drepung stared at him for a few strokes of the paddle. Slowly he said, “People say that certain Bön spirits latch on to a person’s intrinsic nature, and are hard to dislodge with Buddhist ceremonies. The whole history of Buddhism coming to Tibet is one fight after another, trying to drive the Bön spirits out of the land and the people, so that Buddhist precepts and, you know, the nonviolence of Buddhism could take the upper hand. It was hard, and there were many contradictions involved, as usual if you try too hard to fight against violent feelings. That itself can quickly become another violence. Some of the earlier lamas had lots of anger themselves. So the struggle never really ended, I guess you would say.”

“Meaning there are still Bön spirits inhabiting you people?”

“Well, not everyone.”

“But some?”

“Yes, of course. Rudra was often pestered. He could not get rid of one of them. And he had invited them into him so many times, when serving as the oracle, it made him susceptible, you might say. Anyway this one would not leave him. This was one of the reasons he was so irritable in his old age.”

“I never thought he was that bad.” Charlie sighed. “So where is that Bön spirit now, eh? Is Rudra’s soul still having to deal with it in the bardo?”

“Possibly so. We cannot tell from here.”

“He’ll get reborn at some point, presumably.”

“At some point.”

“But so…Are there ceremonies to call spirits into you?”

“Sure. That’s what the oracle does, every time there is a visitation ceremony.”

“Ah ha. So listen, could you then call back the spirit that you exorcised from Joe? Could you explain it was a mistake, and invite him back?”

Drepung paddled on for a while. The silence lingered. Ahead of them Frank was now drifting into the shallows behind a snag.

“Drepung?”

“Yes, Charlie. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Drepung! Don’t give me that one!”

“No, I mean it. In this case, I think I know what you mean. And I have the right figure in mind. The one that was in Joe. A very energetic spirit.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“And I know the right ceremony too.”

“Oh good. Good. Well—let me know what I can do, then?”

“I will. I’ll have to talk to Sucandra about it, but he will help us. I will tell you when we have made the arrangements, and divined the right time for it.”

“The right time for what?” Frank asked, as they had caught up to him, or at least were within earshot. On the water that was often hard to determine.

“The right time to put Joe Quibler in touch with his spirit.”

“Ah ha! It’s always the right time for that, right?”

“To everything its proper moment.”

“Sure. Look—there’s one of the tapirs from the zoo, see there in that bush?”

“No?”

“There, it’s the same color as the leaves. An animal from South America. But I guess dead leaves are the same color everywhere. Anyway, it’s good to see, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. So how are the feral animals doing generally?”

“Okay. It all depends their natural range. Some species have been spotted seven hundred miles from the zoo, and up to thirty latitude lines out of their natural range. You must have heard Anna talking to Nick about this. She’s helping him and his group to make a habitat corridor map, networking all the remaining wildernesses together. It’s a GIS land-use thing.”

“So if we want it, we can have the animals back.”

“Yeah. We can. It would be cool if the president would back the forest and wilderness initiatives coming out of the animal rights community. Brother to Wolves kind of thing, you know.”

Charlie laughed. “He’s got a lot on his plate. I don’t know if he’s got time for that one right now. It’s a hard thing to get his attention these days.”

For Frank this was a new issue, but Charlie had been dealing with it for years, since long before Phil had become president. It simply was not easy to get any time with someone so powerful and busy. Now Charlie could see that Frank also was running into that limitation. Even though Diane was the presidential science advisor, ensconced in the Old Executive Offices and therefore able to walk over whenever called on to discuss things with the president and his people, she still did not see him very often. He was booked by the minute. No matter how sympathetic Andrea and Roy were to the scientists’ cause, there was very little presidential time available to give to meetings with them. On they had to go, flying in formation, and the days ripped away as in the calendar shots of old movies.

But then one afternoon, after Frank had given Charlie a call to beg for some intercession on the nuclear regulations issue, and Charlie had passed the word along in a call to Roy, he got a call back from that so-busy man.

It was right before dinner time. “The boss is ready to call it a day, but he wants to talk to your people about this regulation relief. So he’s proposed one of his little expeditions over to the Tidal Basin. We take some takeout to the blue pedal boats, and have a picnic on the water.”

“Oh good,” Charlie said. “I’ll call Frank and we’ll meet you down there.”

“Not me, I’ve got stuff to do. Andrea will be going though.”

Charlie called Frank and described the plan.

“Good idea,” Frank said.

The president would be driven over by his Secret Service detail, and as normal hours of operation for the tourist concession there were done for the day, it would be easy to take over the dock and the tidal pool, and unobtrusively to secure the perimeter. The National Park Service was fine with it; indeed, it was already a little presidential tradition, and from their perspective, being political support from the highest position in government, a good thing. Even the most virulent anti-Chase media had not been able to make much hay out of these expeditions—not that they hadn’t tried, but Phil’s laughing ripostes had made them look like prigs and fools, and they had mostly given up on that front.

The time being what it was, Charlie decided to take Joe along. He went down to daycare and found him occupied in some game or other with a girl his age, but he was happy enough to join the Secret Service detail in one of their lightly armored black Priuses.

After they parked on 15th Street and got out and walked down to the pedal-boat dock, where Phil and Andrea and some of the Secret Service guys were already standing, Charlie followed Joe a short way up the basin’s shore path, agreeing that some rocks to throw in the water would be just the thing. Then Joe found some pea gravel and discovered that throwing it in the water by the handful was just as good as throwing bigger rocks.

Looking north at the Mall Charlie saw Diane, Frank, Kenzo, and Edgardo walking down 17th Street. By coming directly across the Mall, they had almost beaten the car caravan. They were a good-looking group, Charlie thought. Edgardo was gesturing in the midst of some comic soliloquy, making the rest laugh. Frank and Diane walked a bit behind, in step, heads together. As they crossed Independence Avenue at the light, Diane slipped her arm under Frank’s, and as they reached the curb he helped her up with what almost looked like a little slap to the bottom. They too were laughing. A couple out on a balmy autumn evening.

They came down to the Tidal Basin on the pedestrian path, and Charlie and Joe joined them on the way to the dock. Some National Park rangers were untying a clutch of the blue pedal boats. The little round lake was empty, the round-topped Jefferson Memorial reflected upside-down in it, the FDR Memorial invisible in a knot of trees on the opposite bank. The late light burnished things. On the dock Charlie saw in the rangers and everyone else that look of contained excitement that surrounded the presidency at all times. This party would make for a story afterward, people’s faces said. Another Phil Chase moment to add to all the rest.

Phil was expert in ignoring all that, crying out hellos to rangers he had seen before, making it clear he was a regular. His security people were forming a scarcely visible human barrier, intercepting tourists approaching to rubber-neck at the scene, establishing an invisible boundary. Joe rushed to the boats lined up and ready against the dock, attempting to get in the first one, but Charlie caught him just in time by the arm. “Wait a second, big guy, you have to have a lifejacket on. You know that, you’re so funny,” feeling all the while pleased to see this flash of the old enthusiasm.

“Hey Joe!” Phil exclaimed. “Good to see you buddy, come on, let’s be the first ones out! I think I see Pedal Boat One right here in front,” stepping down into it.

He reached out for Joe, which meant that Charlie was going to have to join him, and so Charlie took a kid’s life preserver from the ranger offering it and tried to get one of Joe’s arms through it. A quick wrestling move, similar to the one honed by long practice with baby backpack insertions, got him started, but then Charlie looked up to see that Frank had taken Diane by the upper arm and slipped through the group to the edge of the dock. “Here,” Frank said, ushering Diane into Phil’s boat, “I’ve got to be the one who goes out with Joe, I promised him the last time I took out Nick, so I need to go out with them. So here, Diane, you go with the president this time, you guys need to talk anyway.” She looked surprised.

“Good idea!” Phil said, reaching out to help her step into the boat. He smiled his famous smile. “Let’s get a head start on them.”

“Okay,” Diane said as she sat down. Frank turned away from them to greet Joe and lead Charlie to another boat.

Phil and Diane pedaled away from the dock. Charlie and Frank got in the next one, held in place by rangers with boathooks, and they took Joe and strapped him in between them. By the time they were ready to go some time had passed; Phil and Diane were already midpond, chomping away like a little steamboat across the coppery water. Frank waved to them, but they did not see; they were laughing at something, their attention already otherwise engaged.