Читать книгу Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 4

Nobody likes Washington D.C. Even the people who love it don’t like it. Climate atrocious, traffic worse: an ordinary midsized gridlocked American city, in which the plump white federal buildings make no real difference. Or rather they bring all the politicians and tourists, the lobbyists and diplomats and refugees and all the others who come from somewhere else, often for suspect reasons, and thereafter spend their time clogging the streets and hogging the show, talking endlessly about their non-existent city on a hill while ignoring the actual city they are in. The bad taste of all that hypocrisy can’t be washed away even by the food and drink of a million very fine restaurants. No – bastion of the world government, locked vault of the world bank, fortress headquarters of the world police; Rome, in the age of bread and circuses; no one can like that.

So naturally when the great flood washed over the city, wreaking havoc and leaving the capital spluttering in the livid heat of a wet and bedraggled May, the stated reactions were various, but the underlying subtext often went something like this: HA HA HA. For there were many people around the world who felt that justice had somehow been served. Capital of the world, thoroughly trashed: who wouldn’t love it?

Of course the usual things were said by the usual parties. Disaster area, emergency relief, danger of epidemic, immediate restoration, pride of the nation, etc. Indeed, as capital of the world, the President was firm in his insistence that it was everyone’s patriotic duty to support rebuilding, demonstrating a brave and stalwart response to what he called ‘this act of climatic terrorism.’ ‘From now on,’ the President continued, ‘we are at a state of war with nature. We will work until we have made this city even more like it was than before.’

But truth to tell, ever since the Reagan era the conservative (or dominant) wing of the Republican party had been coming to Washington explicitly to destroy the federal government. They had talked about ‘starving the beast,’ but flooding would be fine if it came to that; they were flexible, it was results that counted. And how could the federal government continue to burden ordinary Americans when its center of operations was devastated? Why, it would have to struggle just to get back to normal! Obviously the flood was a punishment for daring to tax income and pretending to be a secular nation. One couldn’t help thinking of Sodom and Gomorrah, the prophecies specified in the Book of Revelation, and so on.

Meanwhile, those on the opposite end of the political spectrum likewise did not shed very many tears over the disaster. As a blow to the heart of the galactic imperium it was a hard thing to regret. It might impede the ruling caste for a while, might make them acknowledge, perhaps, that their economic system had changed the climate, and that this was only the first of many catastrophic consequences. If Washington was denied now that it was begging for help, that was only what it had always done to its environmental victims in the past. Nature bats last – poetic justice – level playing field – reap what you sow – rich arrogant bastards – and so on.

Thus the flood brought pleasure to both sides of the aisle. And in the days that followed Congress made it clear in their votes, if not in their words, that they were not going to appropriate anything like the amount of money it would take to clean up the mess. They said it had to be done; they ordered it done; but they did not fund it.

The city therefore had to pin its hopes on either the beggared District of Columbia, which already knew all there was to know about unfunded mandates from Congress, to the extent that for years their license plates had proclaimed ‘Taxation Without Representation;’ or on the federal agencies specifically charged with disaster relief, like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers and others that could be expected to help in the ordinary course of their missions (and budgets).

Experts from these agencies tried to explain that the flood did not have a moral meaning, that it was merely a practical problem in city management, which had to be solved as a simple matter of public health, safety and convenience. The Potomac had ballooned into a temporary lake of about a thousand square miles; it had lasted no more than a week, but in that time inflicted great damage to the infrastructure. Much of the public part of the city was trashed. Rock Creek had torn out its banks, and the Mall was covered by mud; the Tidal Basin was now part of the river again, with the Jefferson Memorial standing in the shallows of the current. Many streets were blocked with debris; worse, in transport terms, many Metro tunnels had flooded, and would take months to repair. Alexandria was wrecked. Most of the region’s bridges were knocked out or suspect. The power grid was uncertain, the sewage system likewise; epidemic disease was a distinct possibility.

Given all this, certain repairs simply had to be made, and many were the calls for full restoration. But whether these calls were greeted with genuine agreement, Tartuffian assent, stony indifference, or gloating opposition, the result was the same; not enough money was appropriated to complete the job.

Only the essentials were dealt with. Necessary infrastructure, sure, almost; and of course the nationally famous buildings were cleaned up, the Mall replanted with grass and new cherry trees; the Vietnam Memorial excavated, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials recaptured from their island state. Congress debated a proposal to leave the high-water mark of greenish mud on the sides of the Washington Monument, as a flood-height record and a reminder of what could happen. But few wanted such a reminder, and in the end they rejected the idea. The stone of the great plinth was steam-cleaned, and around it the Mall began to look as if the flood had never happened. Elsewhere in the city, however …

It was not a good time to have to look for a place to live.

And yet this was just what Frank Vanderwal had to do. He had leased his apartment for a year, covering the time he had planned to work for the National Science Foundation; then he had agreed to stay on for a second year. Now, only a month after the flood, his apartment had to be turned over to its owner, a State Department foreign service person he had never met, returning from a stint in Brazil. So he had to find someplace else.

No doubt the decision to stay another year had been a really bad idea.

This thought had weighed on him as he searched for a new apartment, and as a result he had not persevered as diligently as he ought to have. Very little was available in any case, and everything on offer was prohibitively expensive. Thousands of people had been drawn to D.C. by a flood that had also destroyed thousands of residences, and damaged thousands more beyond immediate repair and reoccupation. It was a real seller’s market, and rents shot up accordingly.

Many of the places Frank had looked at were also physically repulsive in the extreme, including some that had been thrashed by the storm and not entirely cleaned up: the bottom of the barrel, still coated with sludge. The low point in this regard came in one semi-basement hole in Alexandria, a tiny dark place barred for safety at the door and the single high window, so that it looked like a prison for troglodytes; and two thousand a month. After that Frank’s will to hunt was gone.

Now the day of reckoning had come. He had cleared out and cleaned up, the owner was due home that night, and Frank had nowhere to go.

It was a strange sensation. He sat at the kitchen counter in the dusk, strewn with the various sections of the Post. The ‘Apartments for Rent’ section was less than a column long, and Frank had learned enough of its code by now to know that it held nothing for him. More interesting had been an article in the day’s Metro section about Rock Creek Park. Officially closed due to severe flood damage, it was apparently too large for the over-extended National Park Service to be able to enforce the edict. As a result the park had become something of a no-man’s land, ‘a return to wilderness,’ as the article had put it.

Frank surveyed the apartment. It held no more memories for him than a hotel room, as he had done nothing but sleep there. That was all he had needed out of a home, his life proper having been put on hold until his return to San Diego. Now, well … it was like some kind of premature resuscitation, on a voyage between the stars. Time to wake up, time to leave the deep freeze and find out where he was.

He got up and went down to his car.

Out to the Beltway to circle north and then east, past the elongated Mormon temple and the great overpass graffiti referencing it: GO HOME DOROTHY! Get off on Wisconsin, drive in toward the city. There was no particular reason for him to visit this part of town. Of course the Quiblers lived over here, but that couldn’t be it.

He kept thinking; Homeless person, homeless person. You are a homeless person. A song from Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ came to him, the one where one of the South African groups kept singing, Homeless; homeless, Da da da, da da da da da da … something like, Midnight come, and then you wanna go home. Or maybe it was a Zulu phrase. Or maybe, as he seemed to hear now: Homeless; homeless; he go down to find another home.

Something like that. He came to the intersection at the Bethesda Metro stop, and suddenly it occurred to him why he might be there. Of course – this was where he had met the woman in the elevator. They had gotten stuck together coming up from the Metro; alone together underground, minute after minute, until after a long talk they had started kissing, much to Frank’s surprise. And then when the repair team had arrived and they were let out, the woman had disappeared without Frank learning anything about her, even her name. It made his heart pound just to remember it. Up there on the sidewalk to the right, beyond the red light – there stood the very elevator box they had emerged from. And then she had appeared to him again, on a boat in the Potomac during the height of the great flood. He had called her boat on his cell phone, and she had answered, had said, ‘I’ll call. I don’t know when.’

The red light turned green. She had not called and yet here he was, driving back to where they had met as if he might catch sight of her. Maybe he had even been thinking that if he found her, he would have a place to stay.

That was silly; an example of magical thinking at its most unrealistic. And he had to admit that in the past couple of weeks he had been looking for apartments in this area. So it was not just an isolated impulse, but a pattern of behavior.

Just past the intersection he turned into the Hyatt driveway. A valet approached and Frank said, ‘Do you know if there are any rooms available here?’

‘Not if you don’t got a reservation.’

Frank hurried into the lobby to check anyway. A receptionist shook her head: no vacancies. She wasn’t aware of the situation at any other hotel. The ones in their chain were full all over the metropolitan area.

Frank got back in his car and drove onto Wisconsin heading south, peering at the elevator kiosk when he passed it. She had given a fake name on the Metro forms they had been asked to fill out. She would not be there now.

Down Wisconsin, past the Quibler’s house a couple of blocks over to the right. That was what had brought him to this part of town, on the night he and the woman got stuck in the elevator. Anna Quibler, one of his colleagues at NSF, had hosted a party for the Khembali ambassador, who had given a lecture at NSF earlier that day. A nice party. An excess of reason is itself a form of madness, the old ambassador had said to Frank. Frank was still pondering what that meant, and if it were true, how he might act on it.

But he couldn’t visit Anna and her family now. Showing up unannounced, with no place to go – it would have been pitiful.

He drove on. Homeless, homeless – he go down to find another home.

Chevy Chase looked relatively untouched by the flood. There was a giant hotel above Dupont Circle, the Hilton; he drove down Wisconsin and Massachusetts and turned up Florida to it, already feeling like he was wasting his time. There would be no rooms available.

There weren’t. ‘Homeless, homeless. Midnight come, and blah blah blah blah blahhhh.’

He drove up Connecticut Avenue, completely without a plan. Near the entrance to the National Zoo damage from the flood suddenly became obvious, in the form of a mud-based slurry of trash and branches covering the sidewalks and staining the storefronts. Just north of the zoo, traffic stopped to allow the passage of a backhoe. Street repairs by night, in the usual way. Harsh blue spotlights glared on a scene like something out of Soviet cinema, giant machines dwarfing a cityscape.

Impatiently Frank turned right onto a side street. He found an empty parking spot on one of the residential streets east of Connecticut, parked in it.

He got out and walked back to the clean-up scene. It was still about 90 degrees out, and tropically humid. A strong smell of mud and rotting vegetation evoked the tropics, or Atlantis after the flood. Yes, he was feeling a bit apocalyptic. He was in the end time of something, there was no denying it. Home-less; home-less.

A Spanish restaurant caught his eye. He went over to look at the menu in the window. Tapas. He went in, sat down and ordered. Excellent food, as always. D.C. could almost always be relied on for that. Surely it must be the great restaurant city of the world.

He finished his meal, left the restaurant and wandered the streets, feeling better. He had been hungry before, and had mistaken that for anxiety. Things were not so bad.

He passed his car but walked on east toward Rock Creek Park, remembering the article in the Post. A return to wilderness.

At Broad Branch Road Frank came to the park’s boundary. There was no one visible in any direction. It was dark under the trees on the other side of the road; the yellow streetlights behind him illuminated nothing beyond the first wall of leaves.

He crossed the street and walked into the forest.

The flood’s vegetable stench was strong. Frank proceeded slowly; if there had been any trail here before it was gone now, replaced by windrows of branches and trash, and an uneven deposition of mud. The rootballs of toppled trees splayed up dimly, and snags caught at his feet. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he came to feel that everything was very slightly illuminated, mostly no doubt by the luminous city cloud that chinked every gap in the black canopy.

He heard a rustle, then a voice. Without thought he slipped behind a large tree and froze there, heart pounding.

Two voices were arguing, one of them drunk.

‘Why you buy this shit?’

‘Hey you never buy anything. You need to give some, man.’

The two passed by and continued down the slope to the east, their voices rasping through the trees. Home-less, home-less. Their voices had reminded Frank of the scruffy guys in fatigues who hung out around Dupont Circle.

Frank didn’t want to deal with any such people. He was annoyed; he wanted to be out in a pure wilderness, empty in the way his mountains out west were empty. Instead, harsh laughter nicotined through the trees like hatchet strokes. ‘Ha ha ha harrrrrr.’ There went the neighborhood.

He slipped off in a different direction, down through windrows of detritus, then over hardened mud between trees. Branches clicked damply underfoot. It got steeper than he thought it would, and he stepped sideways to keep from slipping.

Then he heard another sound, quieter than the voices. A soft rustle and a creak, then a faint crack from the forest below and ahead. Something moving.

Frank froze. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up. Whatever it was, it sounded big. The article in the Post had mentioned that many of the animals from the National Zoo had not yet been recaptured. All had been let loose just before the zoo was inundated, to give them a chance of surviving. Some had drowned anyway; most had been recovered afterward; but not all. Frank couldn’t remember if any species in particular had been named in the article as being still at large. It was a big park of course. Possibly a jaguar had been mentioned.

He tried to meld into the tree he was leaning against.

Whatever it was below him snapped a branch just a few trees away. It sniffed; almost a snort. It was big, no doubt about it.

Frank could no longer hold his breath, but he found that if he let his mouth hang open, he could breathe without a sound. The tock of his heartbeat in the soft membrane at the back of his throat must surely be more a feeling than a sound. Most animals relied on scent anyway, and there was nothing he could do about his scent. A thought that could reduce one’s muscles to jelly.

The creature had paused. It huffed. A musky odor that wafted by was almost like the smell of the flood detritus. His heart tocked like Captain Hook’s alarm clock.

A slow scrape, as of shoulder against bark. Another branch click. A distant car horn. The smell now resembled damp fur. Another crunch of leaf and twig, farther down the slope.

When he heard nothing more, and felt that he was alone again, he beat a retreat uphill and west, back to the streets of the city. It was frustrating, because now he was intrigued, and wanted to explore the park further. But he didn’t want to end up one of those urban fools who ignored the reality of wild animals and then got chomped. Whatever that had been down there, it was big. Best to be prudent, and return another time.

After the gloom of the park, all Connecticut seemed as garishly illuminated as the work site down the street. Walking back to his car, Frank thought that the neighborhood resembled one of the more handsome Victorian districts of San Francisco. It was late now, the night finally cooling off. He could drive all night and never find a room.

He stood before his car. The Honda’s passenger seat tilted back like a little recliner. The nearest streetlight was down at the corner.

He opened the passenger door, moved the seat all the way back, lowered it, slipped in and sat down. He closed the door, lay back, stretched out. After a while he turned on his side and fell into an uneasy sleep.

For an hour or two. Then passing footsteps woke him. Anyone could see him if they looked. They might tap the window to see if he was okay. He would have to claim to be a visiting reporter, unable to find a room – very close to the truth, like all the best lies. He could claim to be anyone really. Out here he was not bound to his real story.

He lay awake, uncomfortable in the seat, pretty sure he would not be able to fall back asleep; then he was lightly under, dreaming about the woman in the elevator. A part of his mind became aware that this was unusual, and he fought to stay submerged despite that realization. He was speaking to her about something urgent. Her face was so clear, it had imprinted so vividly: passionate and amused in the elevator, grave and distant on the boat in the flood. He wasn’t sure he liked what she was telling him. Just call me, he insisted. Give me that call and we can work it out.

Then the noise of a distant siren hauled him up, sweaty and unhappy. He lay there a while longer, thinking about the woman’s face. Once in high school he had made out with a girl in a little car like this one, in which the laid-back seat had allowed them somehow to lie on each other. He wanted her. He wanted to find her. From the boat she had said she would call. I don’t know how long, she had said. Maybe that meant long. He would just have to wait. Unless he could figure out some new way to hunt for her.

The sky was lightening. Now he definitely wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep. With a groan he heaved himself up, got out of the car.

He stood on the sidewalk, feeling wasted. The sky was a velvet gray, seeming darker than it had in the middle of the night. The air was cool. He walked east again, back into the park.

Dew polished the thick gray foliage. In the diffuse low light the wet leaves looked like a forest of wax. Frank slowed down. He saw what looked like a trail, perhaps an animal trail. There were lots of deer in the park, the article had said. He could hear the sound of Rock Creek, a burbling that as he descended overwhelmed the city sounds, the perpetual grumble of trucking. The sky was lightening fast, and what had seemed to him cloud cover was revealed as a clear pale sky. Dim greens began to flush the grays. The air was still cool.

It turned out that in this area Rock Creek ran at the bottom of a fairly steep ravine, and the flood had torn the sidewalls away in places, as he saw when he came to a sudden drop-off. Below him, bare sandstone extruded roots like ripped wiring. He circled above the drop, dodging between low trees.

From a little clearing he could suddenly see downstream. The flood in spate had torn the little canyon clear. Everything that had been down there before – Beach Road, the small bridges and buildings, the ranger station, the picnic areas – all of it was gone, leaving a raw zone of bare sandstone, flat mud, thrashed grass, downed timber, and stubborn trees that were either clinging to life or dead in place. Many trees had been knocked over and yet held on by a few roots, forming living snags piled high with mud and trash. A larger snag downstream looked like a giant beaver dam, creating a dirt-brown pond.

The sky stood big and blue overhead, a tall dome that seemed to rise as the day lightened. Muddy Rock Creek burbled noisily down its course, spilling from one foamy brown stretch to the next.

At the far edge of the pond a heron strode slowly, its knees bending backward. Long body, long legs, long neck, long head, long beak. A great blue heron, Frank guessed, though this one’s dark gray feathers looked more green than blue. A kind of dinosaur. And indeed nothing could have looked more pterodactylic. Two hundred million years.

Sunlight blazed green at the tops of the trees across the ravine. Frank and the heron stood attentively, listening to unseen smaller birds whose wild twittering now filled the air. The heron’s head cocked to one side. For a time everything was as still as bronze.

Then beyond the twittering came a different sound, fluid and clear, rising like a siren, like a hook in the flesh:

Oooooooooooooooooop!

National Science Foundation, Arlington Virginia, basement parking lot, seven AM. A primate sitting in his car, thinking things over. As one of the editors of The Journal of Sociobiology Frank was very much aware of the origins of their species. The third chimp, as Diamond had put it. Now he thought: chimps sleep outdoors. Bonobos sleep outdoors.

Housing was ultimately an ergonomic problem. What did he really need? His belongings were here in the car, or upstairs in his office, or in boxes at UCSD, or in storage units in Encinitas, California, or down the road in Arlington, Virginia. The fact that stuff was in storage showed how much it really mattered. By and large he was free of worldly things. At age forty-three he no longer needed them. That felt a little strange, actually, but not necessarily bad. Did it feel good? It was hard to tell. It simply felt strange.

He got out of his car and took the elevator to the third floor, where there was a little exercise room, with a men’s room off its entryway that included showers. In his shoulder bag he carried his laptop, his cell phone, his bathroom kit, and a change of clothes. The three shower stalls stood behind white curtains, near an area with benches and lockers. Beyond it extended the room containing toilets, urinals, and a counter of sinks under a long mirror.

Frank knew the place, having showered and changed in it many times after runs at lunch with Edgardo and Kenzo and Bob and the others. Now he surveyed it with a new regard. It was as he remembered: an adequate bathroom, public but serviceable.

He undressed and got in one of the showers. A flood of hot water, almost industrial in quantity, washed away some of the stiffness of his uncomfortable night. Of course no one would want to be seen showering there every day. Not that anyone was watching, but some of the morning exercisers would eventually notice.

A membership in some nearby exercise club would provide an alternative bathroom.

What else did one need?

Somewhere to sleep, of course. The Honda would not suffice. If he had a van, and an exercise club membership, and this locker room, and his office upstairs, and the men’s rooms up there … As for food, the city had a million restaurants.

What else?

Nothing he could think of. Many people more or less lived in this building, all the NSF hardcores who spent sixty or seventy hours a week here, ate their meals at their desks or in the neighborhood restaurants, only went home to sleep – and these were people with families, with kids, homes, pets, partners!

In a crowd like that it would be hard to stick out.

He got out of the shower, dried off (a stack of fresh white towels was there at hand), shaved, dressed.

He glanced in the mirror over the sink, feeling a bit shy. He didn’t look at himself in mirrors anymore, never met his eye when shaving, stayed focused on the skin under the blade. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because he did not resemble his conception of himself, which was vaguely scientific and serious, say Darwinesque; and yet there in the glass getting shaved was always the same old sun-fried jock.

But this time he looked. To his surprise he saw that he looked normal – that was to say, the same as always. Normative. No one would be able to guess by his appearance that he was sleep-deprived, that he had been thinking some pretty abnormal thoughts, or, crucially, that he had spent the previous night in his car because he no longer had a home.

‘Hmm,’ he told his reflection.

He took the elevator up to the tenth floor, still thinking it over. He stood in the doorway of his new office, evaluating the place by these new inhabitory criteria. It was a true room, rather than a carrel in a larger space, so it had a door he could close. It boasted one of the big inner windows looking into the building’s central atrium, giving him a direct view of the big colored mobile that filled the atrium’s upper half.

This view was unfortunate, actually. He didn’t want to look at that mobile, for not too long ago he had found himself hanging upside down from it, in the middle of the night, working desperately to extricate himself from an ill-conceived and poorly executed break-and-enter job. He had been trying and failing to recover a poorly-worded resignation letter he had left for Diane Chang, the NSF director. It was an incident he would really rather forget.

But there the mobile hung, at the new angle which Frank had given to it and which no one had noticed, perhaps a reminder to – to what? To try not to do stupid things. To think things through before attempting them. But he always tried to do that, so the reminder was unnecessary. Really, the mobile outside his window was a disadvantage. But drapes could be installed.

There was room for a short couch against one wall, if he moved the bookcase there to the opposite corner. It would then be like a kind of living room, with the computer as entertainment center. There was an ordinary men’s room around the corner, a coffee nook down the hall, the showers downstairs. All the necessities. As Sucandra had remarked, at dinner once at the Quiblers’, tasting spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon: Ahhhh – what now is lacking?

Same answer: Nothing.

It had to be admitted that it made him uneasy to be contemplating this idea. Unsettled. It was deranged, in the literal sense of being outside the range. Typically people did not choose to live without a home. No home to go home to; it was perhaps a little crazy.

But in some obscure way, that aspect pleased him too. It was not crazy in the way that breaking into the building through the skylight had been crazy; but it shared that act’s commitment to an idea. And was it any crazier than handing well over half of your monthly take-home income to pay for seriously crappy lodging?

Nomadic existence. Life outdoors. So often he had thought about, read about, and written about the biological imperatives in human behavior – about their primate nature, and the evolutionary history that had led to humanity’s paleolithic lifestyle, which was the suite of behaviors that had caused their brains to balloon as rapidly as they had; and about the residual power of all that in modern life. And all the while, through all that thinking, reading, and writing, he had been sitting at a desk. Living like every other professional worker in America, a brain in a bottle, working with his fingertips or his voice or simply his thoughts alone, distracted sometimes by daydreams about the brief bursts of weekend activity that would get him back into his body again.

That was what was crazy, living like that when he held the beliefs he did.

Now he was considering acting in accordance with his beliefs. Something else he had heard the Khembalis say at the Quiblers’, this time Drepung: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling.

He wanted these to be true feelings. Everything had changed for him on that day he had gone to the Khembali ambassador’s talk, and then run into the woman in the elevator, and afterward talked to Drepung at the Quiblers’ party, and then, yes, broken into the NSF building and tried to recover his resignation. Everything had changed! Or so it had felt; so it felt still. But for it to be a true feeling, he had to act on it.

Meaning also, as part of all these new behaviors, that he had to meet with Diane Chang, and work with her on coordinating NSF’s response to the climate situation that was implicated in the great flood and many other things.

This would be awkward. His letter of resignation, which Diane had never directly acknowledged receiving, was now an acute embarrassment to him. It had been an irrational attempt to burn his bridges, and by all rights he should now be back in San Diego with nothing but the stench of smoke behind him. Instead, Diane appeared to have read the letter and then ignored it, or rather, considered how to use it to play him like a fish, and reel him back into NSF for another year of service. Which she had done very skillfully.

So now he found that he had to stifle a certain amount of resentment as he went up to see her. He had to meet her secretary Laveta’s steely eye without flinching; pretend, as the impassive black woman waved him in, that all was normal. No way of telling how much she knew about his situation.

Diane sat behind her desk, talking on the phone. She gestured for him to sit down. Graceful hands. Short, Chinese-American, good-looking in an exotic way, businesslike but friendly. A subtly amused expression on her face when she listened to people, as if pleased to hear their news.

As now, with Frank. Although it could be amusement at his resignation letter, and the way she had jiu-jitsued him into staying at NSF. So hard to tell with Diane; and her manner, though friendly, did not invite personal conversation.

‘You’re into your new office?’ she asked.

‘My stuff is, anyway. It’ll take a while to sort out.’

‘Sure. Like everything else these days! What a mess it all is. I have Kenzo and some of his group coming this morning to tell us more about the Gulf Stream.’

‘Good.’

Kenzo and a couple of his colleagues in climate duly appeared. They exchanged hellos, got out laptops, and Kenzo started working the Power Point on Diane’s wall screen.

All the data, Kenzo explained, indicated stalls in what he called the ‘thermohaline circulation.’ At the north ends of the Gulf Stream, where the water on the surface normally cooled and sank to the floor of the Atlantic before heading back south, a particularly fresh layer on the surface had stalled the downwelling. With nowhere to go, the water in the current farther south had slowed to a halt.

What was more, Kenzo said, just such a stall in the thermohaline circulation had been identified as the primary cause of the abrupt climate change that paleoclimatologists had named the Younger Dryas, a bitter little ice age that had begun about eleven thousand years before the present, and lasted for a few thousand years. The hypothesis was that the Gulf Stream’s shutdown, after floods of fresh water coming off the melting ice cap over North America, had meant immediately colder temperatures in Europe and the eastern half of North America. This accounted for the almost unbelievably quick beginning of the Younger Dryas, which analysis of the Greenland ice cores revealed had happened in only three years. Three years, for a major global shift from the worldwide pattern that climatologists called warm-wet, to the worldwide pattern called cool-dry-windy. It was such a radical notion that it had forced climatologists to acknowledge that there must be nonlinear tipping points in the global climate, leading to general acceptance of what was really a new concept in climatology: abrupt climate change.

‘What caused the stall again?’ Diane said.

Kenzo clicked to the next slide, an image of the Earth portraying the immense ice cap that had covered much of the northern hemisphere throughout the last ice age. The end of that one had arrived slowly, in the old-fashioned linear way, melting the top of the ice cap and creating giant lakes that rested on the remaining ice. These lakes had been held in place by ice dams that were themselves melting, and when the dams had at last given way, extraordinarily large floods of fresh water had rushed down into the ocean, emptying volumes as large as the Great Lakes in a matter of weeks. Signs left on the landscape indicated this had happened down the watersheds of the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Mississippi, and out west, a lake covering most of Montana had drained down the course of the Columbia River several times, leaving an area in Washington called the scablands which gave eloquent testimony to the power of these floods to tear into the bedrock. Presumably the same thing had happened on the East Coast, but the signs had mostly been submerged by rising sea levels or the great eastern forest, so that they were only now being discerned.

Frank, looking at the map on the screen, thought of how Rock Creek had looked that morning at dawn. Theirs had been a very tiny flood relative to the ones Kenzo was describing, and yet the watershed was devastated.

So, Kenzo continued, fresh water, dumped into the North Atlantic all at once, appeared to block the thermohaline cycle. And nowadays, for the last several years, the Arctic Ocean’s winter sea ice had been breaking up into great fleets of icebergs, which then sailed south on currents until they encountered the Gulf Stream’s warm water, where they melted. The melting zones for these icebergs, as a map on the next slide made clear, were just above the northern ends of the Gulf Stream, the so-called downwelling areas. Meanwhile the Greenland ice cap and glaciers were also melting much faster than had been normal, and running off both sides of that great island.

‘How much fresh water in all that?’ Diane asked.

Kenzo shrugged. ‘The Arctic is about ten million square kilometers. The sea ice lately is about five meters thick. Not all of that drifts into the Atlantic, of course. There was a paper that estimated that about twenty thousand cubic kilometers of fresh water had diluted the Arctic over the past thirty years, but it was plus or minus five thousand cubic kilometers.’

‘Let’s get better parameters on that figure, if we can,’ Diane said.

‘Sure.’

They stared at the final slide. The implications tended to stall on the surface of the mind, Frank thought, like the water in the north Atlantic, refusing to gyre down. The whole world, ensconced in a global climate mode called warm and wet, and getting warmer and wetter because of global warming caused by anthropogenically released greenhouse gases, could switch to a global pattern that was cold, dry, and windy. And the last time it happened, it had taken three years. Hard to believe; but the Greenland ice core data were very clear, and the rest of the case equally persuasive – one might even say, in science’s distinctive vocabulary of levels of certainty, compelling.

When Kenzo and his team had left, Diane turned to Frank. ‘What do you think?’

‘It looks serious. It may get people to take action.’

‘Except by now it may be too late.’

‘Yes.’

They considered that in silence for a few moments, and then Diane said, ‘Let’s talk about your second year here, how to organize it to get the most out of you.’

That was a pretty blunt way to put it, given Diane’s manipulations, but Frank was careful not to express any resentment. ‘Sure,’ he said. It had been documented that if you forced your face to take on pleasant expressions, your mood tended helplessly to follow. So, small smile of acceptance; pull chair up to desk.

They worked their way down a list Diane had made identifying areas where NSF might do something to deal with the impacts of abrupt climate change. As they did Frank saw that Diane was well ahead of him in thinking about these matters, which he found a little surprising, although of course it made sense; otherwise why would she have wanted him to stay another year? His letter would not have been what brought her the news of NSF’s ineffectiveness in dealing with a crisis situation.

She spoke very quickly. Slightly fog-minded, Frank struggled to keep up, looking at her more closely than ever before. Of course every face was inscrutable in the end. Diane’s was dramatically planed, cheekbones, forehead, and jaw all distinct and somehow angled to each other. Formal; formidable. Asian dragon lady, yes. She drew the eye. She was about ten years Frank’s senior, he had gathered; a widow, he had heard; had been NSF head for a long time, Frank wasn’t sure how long. Famous for her incredibly long work days. They used to call people like her workaholics before everyone got up to speed and the concept had gone away. Once Edgardo had said of Diane, she makes Anna look like a slacker, and Frank had shuddered, because Anna was a veritable maniac for work. Anything beyond that pretty much had to be insane. And this was who he was going to be working for.

Well, fine. He had not stayed in D.C. to fool around. He too wanted to work long hours. And now it was clear he would have Diane’s ear and her support, therefore the cooperation of anyone needed at NSF; things would therefore get done. That was the only thing that would make staying in Washington bearable.

He focused on her list:

• Coordinate already existing federal programs

• Establish new institutes and programs where necessary

• Work with Sophie Harper, NSF’s congressional liaison officer, to contact and educate all the relevant Congressional committees and staffs, and help craft appropriate legislation

• Work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Environmental Program, its Millennial Project, and other international efforts

• Identify, evaluate and rank all potential climate mitigation possibilities: clean energy, carbon sequestration, etc.

This last item, to Frank, would create the real Things To Do list.

‘We’ll have to go to New York and talk to people about that stuff,’ Diane said.

‘Yes.’

It would be interesting to watch her there. Asian martial arts were often about turning one’s opponents’ force against them. Certainly she had floored Frank that way. Maybe the rest of the world would follow.

But reviewing the list, he felt a surge of impatience. He tried to express this to Diane politely: he didn’t want to spend his extra year starting studies. He wanted to find where small applications of money and effort could trigger larger actions. He wanted to do things. If the weather was going to heat up, he wanted to cool it. If vice versa, then vice versa. He wanted to identify a viable new energy generation system, he wanted to sequester billions of tons of carbon, he wanted to minimize human suffering and the loss of other species. He wanted impossible things! Quickly he scribbled a new list for their mutual inspection:

• direct climate mitigation

• carbon sequestration (bio, physical)

• water cycle interventions

• clean renewable energy (biomass, solar, wave, tide, wind)

• political action

• a new paradigm (permaculture)

Diane read the list. Her expression of subtle amusement became a full smile, perfectly scrutable.

‘You think big.’

‘Well, it’s a big situation. I mean even the Gulf Stream stall is only a proximate cause. The ultimate causes have to do with the whole situation. Carbon, consumption, population, technology, all that. We’ll have to try to take all that on if we’re going to actually do something.’

‘There are other agencies working on these things. In fact, lots of this isn’t really our purview.’

‘Yes, well, but – we are the National Science Foundation,’ emphasizing the words. ‘It isn’t really clear yet just how big a purview such an organization should have. Given the importance of science in this world, you could argue that it should be pretty much everything. But for sure it should be the place to coordinate the scientific effort. Beyond that, who knows? It’s a new situation.’

‘True,’ she said, still smiling at him in her amused way. ‘Well, okay! Let’s go get some lunch and talk about it.’

Frank tried to conceal his surprise. ‘Sure.’

The hotel above the Ballston Metro offered a buffet lunch that was so fancy that it redefined the concept. The restaurant was cool and quiet, decorated in the finest American Hotel Anonymous. Diane appeared to know it well, and to have a hidden corner table reserved. She filled a big plate with salad and some strips of seared flank steak, and took no bread. Iced tea without sugar. She was dressed in a businesslike skirt and heavy silk blouse, and Frank saw as he followed her that it was all perfectly tailored and fitted, and looked expensive. She moved gracefully, looked strong. Usually Frank’s eye was not attracted to short women, but when it happened it was a matter of proportion, a kind of regal bearing. She wore flat shoes, and did not seem attentive to herself. Probably, judging by her food, thought of herself as overweight. But she looked good.

The irrepressible sociobiologist that was always theorizing inside Frank wondered if he was experiencing some bias here, given that she was a powerful alpha female, and his boss. Perhaps all alpha females were somehow physically impressive, and this part of their alpha-ness; it was generally true of males.

They sat, ate, spoke of other things. Frank asked about her kids.

‘Grown up and moved out. It’s easier now.’ She spoke offhandedly, as if talking about a matter that did not really concern her. ‘How could it not be.’

‘For a while it must have been busy.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Where were you before NSF?’

‘University of Washington. Biophysics. Then I got into administration there, then at triple A S, then NIH. Now here.’ She shrugged, as if to admit that she might have gone down a wrong path somewhere. ‘What about you? What brought you to NSF?’

Well, I gambled with equity that wasn’t entirely mine, lost it, went through a break-up, needed to get away …

It wasn’t a story he wanted to tell. Maybe no one’s story could really be told. She had not mentioned her late husband, for instance. She would understand if he only spoke of his scientific reasons for coming to NSF: new work in bio-algorithms, needed a wider perspective to see what was out there, a year visiting NSF good for that – and so on.

She nodded, watching him with that amused expression, as if to say, I know this is only part of the story but it’s still interesting. He liked that. No wonder she had risen so high. Alpha females pursued different strategies than alpha males to achieve their goals; their alpha-ness derived from different social qualities.

‘What about your living situation?’ she asked. ‘Were you able to stay in the place you had?’

Startled, Frank said, ‘No. I was renting from a State Department guy who came back.’

‘So you managed to find another place?’

‘Yes … For the moment I’m in a temporary place, and I’ve got some leads for a permanent one.’

‘That’s good. It must be tough right now, with the flood.’

‘That’s for sure. It’s gotten very expensive.’

‘I bet. Let me know if we can help with that.’

‘Thanks, I will.’

He wondered what she meant, but did not want to ask. ‘One thing I’m looking into is joining an exercise club around here, and Anna mentioned that you went to one?’

‘Yes, I go to the Optimodal.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Sure, it’s okay. It’s not too expensive, and it has all the usual stuff. And it’s not just kids showing off. Most days I just get on a treadmill and go.’ She laughed. ‘Like a rat on a wheel.’

Just like at work, Frank didn’t say.

‘Actually I’ve been trying more of the machines,’ she added. ‘It’s fun.’

Frank got the address from her, and they went back to the serving area for pie and ice cream (her portion small), and talked a bit more about work. She never made even the slightest hint of reference to his letter of resignation. That was strange enough to disturb his sense of being in a normal professional relationship. It was as if she were in some way holding it over him.

Then, walking in the covered walkway above the street to the NSF building, she said, ‘Let’s set up a regular meeting between us for every two weeks, and add more if you need to. I want to be kept up on what you’re thinking.’

Quickly he glanced down at her. She kept looking at the glass doors they were approaching.

‘That’s the best way to avoid any misunderstandings,’ she went on, still not looking at him. Then, as they reached the doors to their building, she said, ‘I want something to come of this.’

‘Me too,’ he assured her. ‘Believe me.’

They approached the security desk. ‘So what will you do first?’ she asked, as if something had been settled between them.

‘To tell the truth, I think I’ll go see about joining that health club.’

She grinned. ‘Good idea. I’ll see you there sometimes.’

He nodded. ‘And, as far as the working committee, I’ll start making calls and setting it up. I’d like to get Edgardo on it too, if you think that would be okay.’

She laughed. ‘If you can talk him into it.’

So. Frank returned to his office, collecting his thoughts. A workman was there installing a power strip on the newly exposed wall behind his desk, and he waited patiently until the man left. He sat at the desk, swiveled and looked out the window at the mobile in the atrium.

He had spent the night in his car and then lunched with the director of the National Science Foundation, and no one was the wiser. He did feel a little spacy. But when appearances were maintained, no one could tell. Nothing obvious gave it away. One retained a certain privacy.

Remembering a resolution he had made that morning, he picked up the phone and called the National Zoo.

‘Hi, I’m calling to ask about zoo animals that might still be at large?’

‘Sure, let me pass you to Nancy.’

Nancy came on and said hi in a friendly voice, and Frank told her about hearing what seemed like a big animal, near the edge of the park at night. ‘Do you have a list of zoo animals still on the loose?’

‘Sure, it’s on our website. Do you want to join our group?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s a committee of the volunteer group, FONZ? Friends of the National Zoo. You can join that, it’s called the Feral Observation Group.’

‘The FOG?’

‘Yes. We’re all in the FOG now, right?’

‘Yes.’

She gave him the website address, and he checked it out. It turned out to be a good one. Some 1500 Fonzies already. There was a page devoted to the Khembalis’ swimming tigers, and on the FOG page, a list of the animals that had been spotted, as well as a separate list for animals missing since the flood and not yet seen. There was a jaguar on this list. And gibbons had been seen, eight of them, white-cheeked gibbons, along with three siamangs. Almost always in Rock Creek Park.

‘Hmmm.’ Frank recalled the cry he had heard at dawn, pursued the creatures through the web pages. Gibbons and siamangs both hooted in a regular dawn chorus; siamangs were even louder than gibbons, being larger. Could be heard six miles rather than one.

It looked like being in FOG might confer permission to go into Rock Creek Park. You couldn’t observe animals in a park you were forbidden to enter. He called Nancy back. ‘Do FOG members get to go into Rock Creek Park?’

‘Some do. We usually go in groups, but we have some individual permits you can check out.’

‘Cool. Tell me how I do that.’

He left the building and walked down Wilson and up a side street, to the Optimodal Health Club. Diane had said it was within easy walking distance, and it was. That was good; and the place looked okay. Actually he had always preferred getting his ‘exercise’ outdoors, by doing something challenging. Up until now he had felt that clubs like these were mostly just another way to commodify leisure time, in this case changing things people used to do outdoors, for free, into things they paid to do inside. Silly as such.

But if you needed to rent a bathroom, they were great.

So he did his best to remain expressionless (resulting in a visage unusually grim) while he gave the young woman at the desk a credit card, and signed the forms. Full membership, no. Personal trainer ready to take over his thinking about his body but without incurring any legal liability, no way. He did pay extra for a permanent locker in which to store some of his stuff. Another bathroom kit there, another change of clothes; it would all come in useful.

He followed his guide around the rooms of the place, keeping his expressionless expression firmly in place. By the time he was done, the poor girl looked thoroughly unsettled.

Back at NSF he went into the basement to his Honda.

A great little car. But now it did not serve the purpose. He drove west on Wilson for a long time, until he came to the Honda/Ford/Lexus dealer where he had leased this car a year before. In this one aspect of the fiasco that was remaining in D.C., his timing was good; he needed to re-up for another year, and the eager salesman handling him was happy to hear that this time he wanted to lease an Odyssey van. One of the best vans on the road, as the man told him as they walked out to view one. Also one of the smallest, Frank didn’t say.

Dull silver, the most anonymous color around, like a cloak of invisibility. Rear seat removal, yes; therefore room in back for his single mattress, now in storage. Tinted windows all around the back, creating a pretty high degree of privacy. It was almost as good as the VW van he had lived in for a couple of Yosemite summers, parked in the Camp Four parking lot enjoying the stove and refrigerator and pop-top in his tiny motor home. Culturally the notion of small vehicle as home had crashed since then, having been based on a beat/hippie idea of frugality that had lost out to the usual American excess, to the point of being made illegal by a Congress bought by the auto industry. No stoves allowed in little vans, of course! Had to house them in giant Rvs.

But this Odyssey would serve the purpose. Frank skimmed the lease terms, signed the forms. He saw that he might need to rent a post office box. But maybe the NSF address would do.

Walking back out to take possession of his new bedroom, he and the salesman passed a line of parked SUV – tall fat station wagons, in effect, called Expedition or Explorer, absurdities for the generations to come to shake their heads at in the way they once marveled at the finned cars of the fifties. ‘Do people still buy these?’ Frank asked despite himself.

‘Sure, what do you mean? Although now you mention it, there is some surplus here at the end of the year.’ It was May. ‘Long story short, gas is getting too expensive. I drive one of these,’ tapping a Lincoln Navigator. ‘They’re great. They’ve got a couple of TVs in the back.’

But they’re stupid, Frank didn’t say. In prisoner’s dilemma terms, they were always-defect. They were America saying Fuck Off to the rest of the world. Deliberate waste, in a kind of ritual desecration. Not just denial but defiance, a Gotterdammerung gesture that said: If we’re going down we’re going to take the whole world with us. And the roads were full of them. And the Gulf Stream had stopped.

‘Amazing,’ Frank said.

His drove his new Odyssey directly to the storage place in Arlington where he had rented a unit. He liked the feel of the van; it drove like a car. In front of his storage unit he took out its back seats, put them in the oversized metal-and-concrete closet, less than half full with his stuff; took his single mattress out and laid it in the back of the van. Perfect fit. He could use the same sheets and pillows he had been using in his apartment.

‘Home – less, home – less. Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ho ho ho.’

He could sort through the rest of his stored stuff later on. Possibly very little of it would ever come out of boxes again.

He locked up and drove to the Beltway, around in the jam to Wisconsin Avenue, down into the city. The newly ritualized pass by the elevator kiosk at Bethesda. Now he could have dropped in on the Quiblers without feeling pitiful, even though in most respects his circumstances had not changed since the night before; but now he had a plan. And a van. And this time he didn’t want to stop. Over to Connecticut, down to the neighborhood north of the zoo, turn onto the same street he had the night before. He noted how the establishing of habits was part of the homing instinct.

Most streets in this neighborhood were permit parking by day and open parking by night, except for the one night a week they were cleaned. Once parked, the van became perfectly nondescript. Equidistant from two driveways; streetlight near but not too near. He would learn the full drill only by practicing it, but this street looked to be a good one.

Out and up Connecticut. Edward Hopper tableaux, end of the day. The streetwork waiting on the sidewalks for rush hour to be over and the night work to begin. It was mostly retail on this part of Connecticut, with upscale apartments and offices behind, then the residential neighborhood, no doubt extremely expensive even though the houses were not big. Like anywhere else in D.C., there were restaurants from all over the world. It wasn’t just that one could get Ethiopian or Azeri, but that there would be choices: Hari food from southern Ethiopia, or Sudanese style from the north? Good, bad or superb Lebanese?

Having grown up in southern California, Frank could never get used to this array. These days he was fondest of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines, and this area of Northwest was rich in both, so that he had to think about which one he wanted, and whether to eat in or do take-out. Eating alone in a restaurant he would have to have something to read. Funny how reading in a restaurant was okay, while watching a laptop or talking on a cell phone was not. Actually, judging by the number of laptops visible in the taverna at the corner of Connecticut and Brandywine, that custom had already changed. Maybe they were reading from their laptops. That might be okay. He would have to try it and see how it felt.

He decided to do take-out. It was dinner time but there was still lots of light left to the day; he could take a meal out into the park and enjoy the sunset. He walked on Connecticut until he came on a Greek restaurant that would put dolmades and calamari in paper boxes, with a dill yogurt sauce in a tiny plastic container. Too bad about the ouzo and retsina, only sold in the restaurant; he liked those tastes. He ordered an ouzo to drink while waiting for his food, downing it before the ice cubes even got a chance to turn it milky.

Back on the street. The taste of licorice enveloped him like a key signature, black and sweet. Steamy dusk of spring, hazed with blossom dust. Sweatslipping past two women; something in their sudden shared laughter set him to thinking about his woman from the elevator. Would she call? And if so, when? And what would she say, and what would he say? A licorish mood, an anticipation of lust, like a wolf whistle in his mind. Vegetable smell of the flood. The two women had been so beautiful. Washington was like that.

The food in his paper sack was making him hungry, so he turned east and walked into Rock Creek Park, following a path that eventually brought him to a pair of picnic tables, bunched at one end of a small bedraggled lawn. A stone fireplace like a little charcoal oven anchored the ensemble. The muddy grass was uncut. Birch and sycamore trees overhung the area. There had been lots of picnic areas in the park, but most had been located down near the creek and so presumably had been washed away. This one was set higher, in a little hollow next to Ross Drive. All of them, Frank recalled, used to be marked by big signs saying CLOSED AT DUSK. Nothing like that remained now. He sat at one of the tables, opened up his food.

He was about halfway through the calamari when several men tromped into the glade and sat at the other table or stood before the stone fireplace, bringing with them a heavy waft of stale sweat, smoke, and beer. Worn jackets, plastic bags: homeless guys.

Two of them pulled beer cans out of a paper grocery bag. A grizzled one in fatigues saluted Frank with a can. ‘Hey man.’

Frank nodded politely. ‘Evening.’

‘Want a beer?’

‘No thanks.’

‘What’s a matter?’

Frank shrugged. ‘Sure, why not.’

‘Yar. There ya go.’

Frank finished his calamari and drank the offered Pabst Blue Ribbon, watching the men settle around him. His benefactor and two of the others were dressed in the khaki camouflage fatigues that signified Vietnam Vet Down On Luck (Your Fault, Give Money). Sure enough, a cardboard sign with a long story scrawled in felt-tip on it protruded from one of their bags.

Next to the three vets, a slight man with a dark red beard and pony-tail sat on the table. The other three men were black, one of these a youth or even a boy. They sat down at Frank’s table. The youngster unpacked a box that contained a chess set, chessboard, and timer. The man who had offered Frank a beer came over and sat down across from the youth as he set the board. The pieces were cheap plastic, but the timer looked more expensive. The two started a game, the kid slapping the plunger on his side of the timer down after pauses averaging about fifteen seconds, while the vet usually depressed his with a slow touch, after a minute or more had passed, always declaring ‘Ah fuck.’

‘Want to play next?’ the boy asked Frank. ‘Bet you five dollars.’

‘I’m not good enough to play for money.’

‘Bet you that box of squid there.’

‘No way.’ Frank ate on while they continued. ‘You guys aren’t playing for money,’ he observed.

‘He already took all I got,’ the vet said. ‘Now I’m like pitching him batting practice. He’s dancing on my body, the little fucker.’

The boy shook his head. ‘You just ain’t paying attention.’

‘You wore me out, Chessman. You’re beating me when I’m down. You’re a fucking menace. I’m setting up my sneak attack.’

‘Checkmate.’

The other guys laughed.

Then three men ran into their little clearing. ‘Hi guys!’ they shouted as they hustled to the far end of the site.

‘What the hell?’ Frank said.

The big vet guffawed. ‘It’s the frisbee players!’

‘They’re always running,’ one of the other vets explained. He wore a VFW baseball cap and his face was dissolute and whiskery. He shouted to the runners: ‘Hey who’s winning!’

‘The wind!’ one of them replied.

‘Evening, gentlemen,’ another said. ‘Happy Thursday.’

‘Is that what it is?’

‘Hey who’s winning? Who’s winning?’

‘The wind is winning. We’re all winning.’

‘That’s what you say! I got my money on you now! Don’t you let me down now!’

The players faced a fairway of mostly open air to the north.

‘What’s your target?’ Frank called.

The tallest of them had blue eyes, gold-red dreadlocks, mostly gathered under a bandana, and a scraggly red-gold beard. He was the one who had greeted the homeless guys first. Now he paused and said to Frank, ‘The trashcan, down there by that light. Par four, little dogleg.’ He took a step and made his throw, a smooth uncoiling motion, and then the others threw and they were off into the dusk.

‘They run,’ the second vet explained.

‘Running frisbee golf?’

‘Yeah some people do it that way. Rolfing they call it, running golf. Not these guys though! They just run without no name for it. They don’t always use the regular targets either. There’s some baskets out here, they’re metal things with chains hanging from them. You got to hit the chains and the frisbees fall in a basket.’

‘Except they don’t,’ the first vet scoffed.

‘Yeah it’s a finicky sport. Like fucking golf, you know.’

Down the path Frank could see the runners picking up their frisbees and stopping for only a moment before throwing again.

‘How often do they come here?’

‘A lot!’

‘You can ask them, they’ll be back in a while. They run the course forward and back.’

They sat there, once or twice hearing the runners call out. Fifteen minutes later the men did indeed return, on the path they had left.

Frank said to the dreadlocked one, ‘Hey, can I follow you and learn the course?’

‘Well sure, but we do run it, as you see.’

‘Oh yeah that’s fine, I’ll keep up.’

‘Sure then. You want a frisbee to throw?’

‘I’d probably lose it.’

‘Always possible out here, but try this one. I found it today, so it must be meant for you.’

‘Okay.’

Like any other climber, Frank had spent a fair amount of camp time tossing a frisbee back and forth. He much preferred it to hackysack, which he was no good at. Now he took the disk they gave him and followed them to their next tee, and threw it last, conservatively, as his main desire was to keep it going straight up the narrow fairway. His shot only went half as far as theirs, but he could see where it had crashed into the overgrown grass, so he considered it a success, and ran after the others. They were pretty fast, not sprinting but moving right along, at what Frank guessed was about a seven-minute mile pace if they kept it up; and they slowed only briefly to pick up their frisbees and throw them again. It quickly became apparent that the slowing down, throwing, and starting up again cost more energy than running straight through would have, and Frank had to focus on the work of it. The players pointed out the next target, and trusted he would not clock them in the backs of their heads after they threw and ran off. And in fact if he shot immediately after them he could fire it over their heads and keep his shot straight.

Some of the targets were trash cans, tree trunks, or big rocks, but most were metal baskets on metal poles, the poles standing chest high and supporting chains that hung from a ring at the top. Frank had never seen such a thing before. The frisbee had to hit the chains in such a way that its momentum was stopped and it fell in the basket. If it bounced out it was like a rimmer in golf or basketball, and a put-in shot had to be added to one’s score.

One of the players made a putt from about twenty yards away, and they all hooted. Frank saw no sign they were keeping score or competing. The dreadlocked player threw and his frisbee too hit the chains, but fell to the ground. ‘Shit.’ Off they ran to pick them up and start the next hole. Frank threw an easy approach shot, then tossed his frisbee in.

‘What was par there?’ he asked as he ran with them.

‘Three. They’re all threes but three, which is a two, and nine, which is a four.’

‘There’s nine holes?’

‘Yes, but we play the course backward too, so we have eighteen. Backward they’re totally different.’

‘I see.’

So they ran, stopped, stooped, threw, and took off again, chasing the shots like dogs. Frank got into his running rhythm, and realized their pace was more the equivalent of an eight or nine-minute mile. He could run with these guys, then. Throwing was another matter, they were amazingly strong and accurate; their shots had a miraculous quality, flying right to the baskets and often crashing into the chains from quite a distance.

‘You guys are good!’ he said at one tee.

‘It’s just practice,’ the dreadlocked one said. ‘We play a lot.’

‘It’s our religion,’ one of the others said, and his companions cackled as they made their next drives.

Then one of Frank’s own approach shots clanged into the chains and dropped straight in, from about thirty yards out. The others hooted loudly in congratulation.

On his next approach he focused on throwing at the basket, let go, watched it fly straight there and hit with a resounding clash of the chains. A miracle! A glow filled him, and he ran with an extra bounce in his step.

At the end of their round they stood steaming in the dusk, not far from the picnic area and the homeless guys. The players compared numbers, ‘twenty-eight,’ ‘thirty-three,’ which turned out to be how many strokes under par they were for the day. Then high fives and handshakes, and they began to move off in different directions.

‘I want to do that again,’ Frank said to the dreadlocked guy.

‘Any time, you were keeping right with us. We’re here most days around this time.’ He headed off in the direction of the homeless guys, and Frank accompanied him, thinking to return to his dinner site and clear away his trash.

The homeless guys were still there, nattering at each other like Laurel and Hardy: ‘I did not! You did. I did not, you did.’ Something in the intonation revealed to Frank that these were the two he had heard the night before, passing him in the dark.

‘Now you wanna play?’ the chess player said when he saw Frank.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

He sat across from the boy, sweating, still feeling the glow of his miracle shot. Throwing on the run; no doubt it was a very old thing, a hunter thing. His whole brain and body had been working out there. Hunting, sure, and the finding and picking up of the frisbees in the dusk was like gathering. Hunting and gathering; and maybe these were no longer the same activities if one were hunting for explanations, or gathering data. Maybe only physical hunting and gathering would do.

The homeless guys droned on, bickering over their half-assed efforts to get a fire started in the stone fireplace. A piece of shit, as one called it.

‘Who built that?’ Frank asked.

‘National Park. Yeah, look at it. It’s got a roof.’

‘It looks like a smoker.’

‘They were idiots.’

‘It was the WPA, probly.’

Frank said, ‘Isn’t this place closed at dusk?’

‘Yeah right.’

‘The whole fucking park is closed, man. Twenty-four seven.’

‘Closed for the duration.’

‘Yeah right.’

‘Closed until further notice.’

‘Five dollar game?’ the youngster said to Frank, rattling the box of pieces.

Frank sighed. ‘I don’t want to bet. I’ll play you for free.’ Frank waved at the first vet. ‘I’ll be more batting practice for you, like him.’

‘Zeno ain’t never just batting practice!’

The boy’s frown was different. ‘Well, okay.’

Frank hadn’t played since a long-ago climbing expedition to the Cirque of the Unclimbables, a setting in which chess had always seemed as inconsequential as tiddly-winks. Now he quickly found that using the timer actually helped his game, by making him give up analyzing the situation in depth in favor of just going with the flow of things, with the shape or pattern. In the literature they called this approach a ‘good-enough decision heuristic,’ although in this case it wasn’t even close to good enough; he attacked on the left side, had both knights out and a great push going, and then suddenly it was all revealed as hollow, and he was looking at the wrong end of the end game.

‘Shit,’ he said, obscurely pleased.

‘Told ya,’ Zeno scolded him.

The night was warm and full of spring smells, mixing with the mud stench. Frank was still hot from the frisbee run. Some distant gawking cries wafted up from the ravine, as if peacocks were on the loose. The guys at the next table were laughing hard. The third vet was sitting on the ground, trying to read a Post by laying it on the ground in front of the fitful fire. ‘You can only see the fire if you lie on the ground, or look right down the smoke hole. How stupid is that?’ They rained curses on their miserable fire. Chessman finished boxing his chess pieces and took off.

Zeno said to Frank, ‘Why didn’t you play him for money, man? Take him five blow jobs to make up for that.’

‘Whoah,’ Frank said, startled.

Zeno laughed, a harsh ragged bray, mocking and aggressive, tobacco-raspy. ‘HA ha ha.’ A kind of rebuke or slap. He had the handsome face of a movie villain, a sidekick to someone like Charles Bronson or Jack Palance. ‘Ha ha – what you think, man?’

Frank bagged his dinner boxes and stood. ‘What if I had beat him?’

‘You ain’t gonna beat him.’ With a twist of the mouth that added, asshole.

‘Next time,’ Frank promised, and took off.

Primate in forest. Warm and sweaty, full of food, beer and ouzo; still fully endorphined from running with the frisbee guys. It was dark now, although the park wore the same nightcap of noctilucent cloud it had the night before, close over the trees. It provided enough light to see by, just barely. The tree trunks were obvious in some somatic sense; Frank slipped between them as if dodging furniture in a dark house he knew very well. He felt alert, relaxed. Exfoliating in the vegetable night, in the background hum of the city, the click of twigs under his feet. He swam through the park.

An orange flicker glimpsed in the distance caused him to slow down, change direction, approach it at an angle. He hid behind trees as he approached. He sidled closer, like a spy or a hunter. It felt good. Like the frisbee run, but different. He got close enough to be sure it was a campfire, at the center of another brace of picnic tables. Here they had a normal fire ring to work with. Faces in the firelight: bearded, dirty, ruddy. Homeless guys like the ones behind him, like the ones on the street corners around the city, sitting by signs asking for money. Mostly men, but there was one woman sitting at this fire, knitting. She gave the whole scene a domestic look, like something out of Hogarth.

After a while Frank moved on, descending in darkness through the trees. The gash of the torn ravine appeared below him, white in the darkness. A broad canyon of sandstone, brilliant under the luminous cloud. The creek was a black ribbon cutting through it. Probably the moon was near full, somewhere up above the clouds; there was more light than the city alone could account for. Both the cloud ceiling and the newly torn ravine glowed, the sandstone like sinuous naked flesh.

A truck, rumbling in the distance. The sound of the creek burbling over stones. Distant laughter, a car starting; tinkle of broken glass; something like a dumpster lid slamming down. And always the hum of the city, a million noises blended together, like the light caught in the cloud. It was neither quiet, nor dark, nor empty. It definitely was not wilderness. It was city and forest simultaneously. It was hard to characterize how it felt.

Where would one sleep out here?

Immediately the question organized his walk. He had been wandering before, but now he was on the hunt again. He saw that many things were a hunt. It did not have to be a hunt to kill and eat animals. Any search on foot was a kind of hunt. As now.

He ranged up and away from the ravine. First in importance would be seclusion. A flat dry spot, tucked out of the way. There, for instance, a tree had been knocked over in the flood, its big tangle of roots raised to the sky, creating a partial cave under it – but too damp, too closed in.

Cobwebs caught his face and he wiped them away. He looked up into the network of black branches. Being up in a tree would solve so many problems … That was a prehominid thought, perhaps caused merely by craning his neck back. No doubt there was an arboreal complex in the brain crying out: Go home, go home!

He ranged uphill, moving mostly northward. A hilltop was another option. He looked at one of the knolls that divided Rock Creek’s vestigial western tributaries. Nice in some ways; flat; but as with root hollows, these were places where all manner of creatures might take refuge. The truth was that the best nooks were best for everything out there. A distant crash in the brush reminded him that this might include the zoo’s jaguar.

He would need to make some daytime explorations, that was clear. He could always stay in his van, of course, but this felt more real. Scouting trips for the Feral Observation Group. We’re all in the fog now, Nancy had said. He would spend some of his time hunting for animals. A kind of return to the paleolithic, right here in Washington D.C. Repaleolithization: it sounded very scientific, like the engineers who spoke of amishization when they meant to simplify a design. Landscape restoration inside the brain. The pursuit of happiness; and the happiness was in the pursuit.

Frank smiled briefly. He realized he had been tense ever since leaving the rented apartment. Now he was more relaxed, watchful but relaxed, moving about easily. It was late, he was getting tired. Another branch across the face and he decided to call it a night.

He made his way west to Connecticut, hit it at Fessenden, walked south on the sidewalk blinking in the flood of light. It might as well have been Las Vegas or Miami to him now, everything blazing neon colors in the warm spring night. People were out. He strolled along among them. The city too was a habitat, and as such a riot of sensation. He would have to think about how that fit in with the repaleolithization project, because the city was a big part of contemporary society, and people were obviously addicted to it. Frank was himself, at least to parts of it. The technological sublime made everything magical, as if they were all tripping with the shaman – but all the time, which was too much. They had therefore lost touch with reality, gone mad as a collective.

And yet this street was reality too. He would have to think about all this.

When he came to his van no one was in sight, and he slipped inside and locked the doors. It was dark, quiet, comfortable. Very much like a room. A bit stuffy; he turned on the power, cracked the windows. He could start the engine and power the air conditioner for a while if he really needed to.

He set his wristwatch alarm for 4:30 AM, afraid he might sleep through the dawn in such a room. Then he lay down on his familiar old mattress, and felt his body start to relax even further. Home sweet home! It made him laugh.

At 4:30 his alarm beeped. He squeezed it quiet and slipped on his running shoes and got out of the van before his sleepiness knocked him back down. Out into the dawn, the world of grays. This was how cats must see, all the grays so finely gradated. A different kind of seeing altogether.

Into the forest again. The leafy venation of the forest air was a masterpiece of three-dimensionality, the precise spacing of everything suggesting some kind of vast sculpture, as in an Ansel Adams photo. The human eye had an astonishing depth of field.

He stood over the tawny sandstone of Rock Creek’s newly burnished ravine, hearing his breathing. It was barely cool. The sky was shifting from a flat gray to a curved pale blue.

‘Oooooooooop!’

He shivered deep in his flesh, like a horse.

The sound came from overhead; a rising ‘oooooooooo’ that then suddenly fell. Something like the cooing of a dove, or the call of a coyote. A voice, or a kind of siren – musical, unearthly, bizarre. Glissandos up and down. Voices, yes. Gibbons and/or siamangs. Frank had heard such calls long ago, at the San Diego Zoo.

It sounded like there were several of them now. ‘Ooooop! Ooooooooooop! Oooooooooooop!’

Lows to highs, penetrating and pure. The hair on Frank’s neck was sticking out.

He tried it himself. ‘Ooooooop!’ he sang, softly. It seemed to fit in. He could do a fair imitation of one part of their range. His voice wasn’t as fluid, or as clear in tone, and yet still, it was somewhat the same. Close enough to join in unobtrusively.

So he sang with them, and stepped ever so slowly between the trees, looking up trying to catch a glimpse of them. They were feeding off each other’s energy, sounding more and more rambunctious. Wild animals! And they were celebrating the new day, there was no doubt about it. Maybe even celebrating their freedom. There was no way to tell, but to Frank it sounded like it.

Certainly it was true for him – the sound filled him, the morning filled him, spring and all, and he bellowed ‘Oooooooopee oop oop!’ voice cracking at its highest. He longed to sing higher; he hooted as loudly as he could. The gibbons didn’t care. It wasn’t at all clear they had even noticed him. He tried to imitate all the calls he was hearing, failed at most of them. Up, down, crescendo, decrescendo, pianissimo, fortissimo. An intoxicating music. Had any composer ever heard this, ever used this? What were people doing, thinking they knew what music was?

The chorus grew louder and more agitated as the sky lightened. When sunlight pierced the forest they all went crazy together.

Then he saw three of them in the trees, sitting on high branches. He saw their long arms and longer tails, their broad shoulders and skinny butts. One swung away on arms that were as long as its body, to land on a branch by another, accept a cuff and hoot some more. Again their raucous noise buffeted Frank. When they finally quieted down, after an earsplitting climax, the green day was upon them.

Senator Phil Chase said, ‘You know, it’s not a question of you being right and me being wrong.’

‘Of course not,’ Charlie Quibler replied.

Phil grinned. ‘We all agreed that global warming was real.’

‘Yes, of course we did.’

‘No!’ Joe Quibler murmured as he drowsed on Charlie’s back.

Phil laughed to hear it. ‘You’ve got a lie detector there.’

‘Going off all the time, in this company.’

‘Ha ha. Looks like he’s waking up.’

Charlie glanced over his shoulder. ‘I better start walking.’

‘I’ll join you. I can’t stand any more of this anyway.’

They were at the Vietnam Memorial, attending a ceremony to mark its reopening. Phil, a veteran who had served as an Army reporter in Saigon for a year, had said a few words; then the President had shown up, but only near the end, the feeling among his people being that this was one memorial that would be better left buried in the mud. After that Phil was forgotten by the press on hand, which did not surprise him; but Charlie could tell by the slight tightness at the corner of his mouth that the calculated back of the hand to Vietnam had irritated him.

In any case they were free to leave. Normally Phil would have been whisked by car up the Mall to his offices, but a cancellation had opened a half-hour slot in his schedule. ‘Let’s go say hi to Abe,’ he muttered, and turned them west. Offering this gift of time to Charlie; it was as close to an apology as Charlie would ever get.

A month earlier, right before the flood, Charlie had helped craft a giant bill for Phil, designed to jumpstart a real engagement with the climate change problem. Then, in the last phase of intense committee negotiations, Phil had dismantled the bill to get a small part of it passed, effectively destroying the rest. He had promised Charlie he wouldn’t, but he had; and had done so without warning Charlie he was going to.

At the time Charlie had been furious. Phil had shrugged him off. ‘I am only doing the necessary,’ he said, in his version of an Indian accent. ‘I must first be doing the necessary.’

But Charlie did not believe it had been necessary. And it did not help that since the flood Phil had been widely hailed as a prophet on the climate issue. Phil had laughed at this little irony, had thanked Charlie, had ignored with aplomb all Charlie’s explicit and implied I-told-you-sos. ‘It’s all really a compliment to you, Charles – to you and your unworkable brilliance.’

‘Um hmm,’ Charlie said. ‘Yeah right.’

He was enjoying the situation too much to invent his side of the banter. Two old colleagues, out for a walk to the Lincoln Monument; it was the rarest thing in town.

Landscaping equipment dotted the newly restored bank of the Potomac, and the background buzz of the city was augmented by their noise. The violent diesel huffing and puffing might have startled some sleeping children awake, but it served as a lullaby to Joe Quibler; the noise of trucks shifting gears on Wisconsin was his usual soporific, and he loved all big grinding sounds. So now he snoozed happily on, head nestled into the back of Charlie’s neck as they approached the memorial.

This part of the Mall had been twenty feet under the rush of the Potomac during the flood, and being landfill to begin with it had not put up very much resistance to the spate; much of it had been torn away, leaving the Lincoln Memorial an island in the stream. ‘Check it out,’ Charlie said to Phil, pointing up at the big white foursquare building. There was a dark horizontal line partway up it. ‘High water mark. Twenty-three feet above normal.’

Phil frowned at the sight. ‘You know, the goddammed House is never going to appropriate enough money to clean up this city.’

Senators and their staffs often had an immense disdain for the House of Representatives. ‘True.’

‘It’s too much like one of their Bible prophecies, what was that one?’

‘Noah’s flood? Revelation?’

‘Maybe. Anyway they’re loving it. No way they’re going to allocate money to interfere with God’s judgment. That would be bad. That would be worse than, than what – than raising taxes!’

‘Joe’ll wake up if you yell like that.’

‘Sorry. I’ll calm down.’

Joe rolled his head on Charlie’s neck. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Ha,’ Phil said, grinning. ‘Caught in another one.’

Charlie could just glimpse the boy’s red cheek and furrowed brow. He could feel Joe’s agitation; clearly he was once more locked into one of his mighty dreams, which from his sleeping scowls and jerks appeared to be fierce struggles, filled with heartfelt Nos. Joe awakened from them with big sighs of relief, as if escaping to a quieter, lesser reality, a kind of vacation cosmos. It worried Charlie.

Phil noticed Joe’s distress, patted his damp head. Step by broad step they ascended the Memorial.

To Phil this place was sacred ground. He loved Lincoln, had studied his life, often read in the nine volumes of his collected works. ‘This is a good place,’ he said as he always did when visiting the memorial. ‘Solid. Foursquare. Like a dolmen. Like the Parthenon.’

‘Especially now, with all the scaffolding.’

Phil looked in at the big statue, still stained to the knees, a sight that made him grimace. ‘You know, this city and the Federal government are synonymous. They stand for each other, like when people call the administration “the White House”. What is that, metonymy?’

‘Metonymy or synecdoche, I can never remember which.’

‘No one can.’ Phil walked inside, stopped short at the sight of the stained inner walls. ‘Damn it. They are going to let this city sink back into the swamp it came out of.’

‘That’s synecdoche I think. Or the pathetic fallacy.’

‘Pathetic for sure, but how is it patriotic? How do they sell that?’

‘Please Phil, you’re gonna wake him up. They have it both ways, you know. They use code phrases that mean something different to the Christian right than to anyone else.’

‘Like the beast will be slain or whatnot?’

‘Yes, and sometimes even more subtle than that.’

‘Ha ha. Clerics, everywhere you look. Ours are as bad as the foreign ones. Make people hate their government at the same time you’re scaring them with terrorists, what kind of program is that?’ Phil drifted through the subdued crowd toward the left wall, into which was incised the Gettysburg Address. The final lines were obscured by the flood’s high water mark, a sight which made him scowl. ‘They had better clean this up.’

‘Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all.’

‘Abraham Lincoln was no Republican.’

‘Hello?’

‘The Republicans in Congress hated him like poison. The goddammed Copperheads did everything they could to sabotage him. They cheered when he was killed, because then they could claim him as a martyr and rip off the South in his name.’

‘Limited value in hitting them with that now.’

‘But it’s still happening! I mean whatever happened to government of the people by the people and for the people not perishing from this earth?’ Pointing at the marred lines on the wall, looking as heavily symbolic as an image in a Cocteau film.

‘An idea that lost?’ Charlie said, spurring him on.

‘Democracy can’t lose. It has to succeed.’

‘“Democracy will never succeed, it takes up too many evenings.”’

‘Ha. Who said that?’

‘Oscar Wilde.’

‘Please. I mean, I see his point, but don’t quote Oscar Wilde to me when I’m trying to think like Abraham Lincoln.’

‘Wilde may be more your level.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Wilde was witty just like that.’

‘Ha ha ha.’

Charlie gave up tweaking Phil in favor of contemplating the mud-stained statue of the sixteenth president. It was a great work: massive, brooding, uneasy. The big square-toed boots and obviously handmade broadcoat somehow evoked the whole world of the nineteenth century frontier. This was the spirit that America had given to the world – its best gesture, its exemplary figure.

His oversized hands were dirty. The great bearded head looked sadly over them. The whole interior space of the building had a greatness about it – the uncanny statue, the high square ceiling, the monumental lettering of the speeches on the side walls, the subdued people visiting it. Even the kids there were quiet and watchful.

Perhaps it was this that woke Joe. He yawned, arched back in his seat, whacked Charlie on the head. ‘Down! Down!’

‘Okay okay.’

Charlie went back outside to let him down. Phil came along, and they sat on the top step and let Joe stretch his legs behind them.

A TV crew was working at the bottom of the steps, filming what looked to be a story on the memorial’s reattachment to land. When the reporter spotted them, he came up to ask Phil if he would make a comment for the program.

‘My pleasure,’ Phil said. The reporter waved his crew over, and soon Phil was standing before the camera in a spot where Lincoln loomed over his left shoulder, launching into one of his characteristic improvs. ‘I’m sick of people putting Washington down,’ he said, waving a hand at the city. ‘What makes America special is our constitution, and the laws based on it – it’s our government that makes America something to be proud of, and that government is based here. So I don’t like to see people wrapping themselves in the flag while they trash the very country they pretend to love. Abraham Lincoln would not stand for it –’

‘Thanks, Senator! I’m sure we can use that. Some of it, anyway.’

‘I should hope so.’

Then a shout of alarm came from inside the building, causing Charlie to shoot to his feet and spin around, looking for Joe – no luck. ‘Joe!’ he cried, rushing inside.

Past the pillars he skidded to a halt, Phil and the TV crew crashing in behind him. Joe was sitting up on Lincoln’s knee, far above them, looking around curiously, seemingly unaware of the long drop to the marble floor.

‘Joe!’ Charlie tried to catch his attention without causing him to topple off. ‘Joe! Don’t move! Joe! Stay there!’

How the hell did you get up there, he didn’t add. Because Lincoln’s marble chair was smooth and vertical on all sides; there was no way up it even for an adult. It almost seemed like someone had to have lifted him up there. Of course he was an agile guy, a real monkey, very happy on the climbing structures at Gymboree. If there was a way, he had the will.

Charlie hustled around the statue, hoping to find Joe’s route up and follow it himself. There was no way. ‘Joe! Stay right there! Stay right there till we get you!’

A group was gathering at Lincoln’s feet, ready to catch Joe if he fell off. He sat there looking down at them with an imperial serenity, completely at ease. The TV cameraman was filming everything.

The best Charlie could think to do was to request a boost from two willing young men, and clamber onto their shoulders as they stood on Lincoln’s right boot and wrapped their arms around his calf. From there Charlie could reach up with his arms and almost reach Joe, although at that point it was a balancing act, and things were precarious. He had to talk Joe into toppling over into his hands, which of course took a while, as Joe was clearly happy where he was. Eventually, however, he tipped forward and Charlie caught him, and let him down between his legs onto the two young men and a nest of hands, before falling back himself into the arms of the crowd.

The crowd cheered briefly, then gave them a little round of applause. Charlie thanked the two young men as he collected the squirming Joe from other strangers.

‘Jesus, Joe! Why do you do these things?’

‘Look!’

‘Yeah yeah, look. But how the hell did you get up there?’

‘Up!’

Charlie took some deep breaths, feeling a bit sick to his stomach. If the TV station ran the story, which they probably would, and if Anna saw it, which she probably wouldn’t, then he would be in big trouble. But what could you do? He had only taken his eye off him for a second!

Phil got back in front of the camera with them, heightening the chances it would make it to the news. ‘This is my young friend Joe Quibler and his father Charlie, a member of my staff. Good job, you guys. You know, citizens like Joe are the ones we have to think about when we consider what sort of world we’re going to be handing along to them. That’s what government is, it’s making the world we want to give to our kids. People should think about that before they put down Washington D.C. and our country’s government. Lincoln would not approve!’

Indeed, Lincoln stared down at the scene with a knowing and disenchanted air. He looked concerned about the fate of the republic, just as Phil had implied.

The reporter asked Phil a few more questions, and then Phil signaled that he had to go. The TV crew shut down, and the little crowd that had stayed to watch dissipated.

Phil phoned his office to get a car sent, and while they waited he shook some hands. Charlie roamed the sanctum with Joe in his arms, looking for routes up to the great American’s lap. There were some disassembled scaffolds stacked on their sides against the back wall of the chamber, behind Lincoln and next to an inner pillar; it was just conceivable that Joe had monkeyed up those. Easier than doing a dirretissima up Lincoln’s calf, but still. It was hard to figure.

‘God damn, Joe,’ Charlie muttered. ‘How do you do this stuff?’

Eventually he rejoined Phil, and they stood on the steps of the memorial, holding Joe by the hand between them and swinging him out toward the reflecting pools, causing Joe to laugh helplessly.

Phil said, ‘You know, we’re swinging him right over the spot Martin Luther King stood on when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He is really touching all the bases today.’

Charlie, still a little bit shaky with relief, laughed and said, ‘Phil, you should run for President.’

Phil grinned his beautiful grin. ‘You think so?’

‘Yes. Believe me, I don’t want to say it. It would mean endless hassle for me, and I haven’t got the time.’

‘You? What about me?’ Phil was looking back up into the building.

‘Endless hassle for you too, sure. But you already live that way, right? It would just be more of the same.’

‘A lot more.’

‘But if you’re going to run for high office at all, you might as well make the biggest impact you can. Besides you’re one of the only people in the world who can beat the happy man.’

‘You think so?’

‘I do. You’re the World’s Senator, right? And the world needs you, Phil. I mean, when the hyperpower goes crazy what are the rest of us going to do? We need help. It’s more than just cleaning up the city here. More even than America. It’s the whole world needs help now.’

‘A godawful fate,’ Phil murmured, looking up at the somber and unencouraging Lincoln. A bad idea, Lincoln seemed to be saying. Serious business. Copperheads striking at heel and head. You put your life on the line. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’