And speak of the devil, Anna came in to thank the panelists for their efforts, slightly flushed and formal in her remarks. When she left, Frank said, “Thanks from me too. It’s been exhausting as usual, but good work was done. I hope to see all of you here again at some point, but I won’t bother you too soon either. I know some of you have planes to catch, so let’s quit now, and if any of you have anything else you want to add, tell me individually. Okay, we’re done.”
Frank printed out a final copy of the spreadsheet. The money numbers suggested they would end up funding about ten of the forty-four proposals. There were seven in the “Fund” column already, and six of those in the “Fund If Possible” column had been ranked slightly higher than Yann Pierzinski’s proposal. If Frank, as NSF’s representative, did not exercise any of his discretionary power to find a way to fund it, that proposal would be declined.
* * *
Another day for Charlie and Joe. A late spring morning, temperatures already in the high nineties and rising, humidity likewise.
They stayed in the house for the balm of the air-conditioning, falling out of the ceiling vents like spills of clear syrup. They wrestled, they cleaned house, they ate breakfast and elevenses. Charlie read some of the Post while Joe devastated dinosaurs. Something in the Post about India ’s drought reminded Charlie of the Khembalis, and he put in his earphone and gave his friend Sridar a call.
“Hey Sridar, it’s Charlie.”
“Charlie, good to hear from you! I got your message.”
“Oh good, I was hoping you had. How’s the lobbying business going?”
“We’re keeping at it. We’ve got some interesting clients, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes I do.”
Charlie and Sridar had worked together for a lobbying firm several years before. Now Sridar worked for Branson and Ananda, a small but prestigious firm representing several foreign governments in their dealings with the American government. Some of these governments had customs at home that made representing them to Congress a challenge.
“So you said something about a new country? I’m glad you’re keeping an eye out for new clients for me.”
“Well it was through Anna, like I said.” Charlie explained how they had met. “When I was talking to them I thought they could use your help.”
“Oh dear, how nice.”
“Yeah well, you need some challenges.”
“Right, like I have no challenges. What’s this new country, then?”
“Have you heard of Khembalung?”
“I think so. One of the League of Drowning Nations?”
“Yeah that’s right.”
“You’re asking me to take on a sinking island nation?”
“Actually they’re not sinking, it’s the ocean that’s rising.”
“Even worse. I mean what are we going to be able to do about that, stop global warming?”
“Well, yeah. That’s the idea. But you know. There’ll be all sorts of other countries working on the same thing. You’d have lots of allies.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyway they could use your help, and they’re good guys. Interesting. I think you’d enjoy them. You should at least meet with them and see.”
“Yeah okay. My plate is kinda full right now, but I could do that. No harm in meeting.”
“Oh good. Thanks Sridar, I appreciate that.”
“No problem. Hey can I have Krakatoa too?”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
After that Charlie was in the mood to talk, but he had no real reason to call anybody. He and Joe played again. Bored, Charlie even resorted to turning on the TV. A pundit show came on and helplessly he watched. “They are such lapdogs,” he complained to Joe. “See, that whole studio is a kind of pet’s bed, and these guys sit in their places like pets in the palm of a giant, speaking what the giant wants to hear. My God how can they stand it! They know perfectly well what they’re up to, you can see the way they parade their little hobbies to try to distract us, see that one copies definitions out of the dictionary, and that one there has memorized all the rules of pinochle for Christ’s sake, all to disguise the fact that they have not a single principle in their heads except to defend the rich. Disgusting.”
“BOOM!” Joe concurred, catching Charlie’s mood and flinging a tyrannosaurus into the radiator with a clang.
“That’s right,” Charlie said. “Good job.”
He changed the channel to ESPN 5, which showed classic women’s volleyball doubles all day along. Retired guys at home must be a big demographic. And so tall muscular women in bathing suits jumped around and dove in the sand; they were amazingly skillful. Charlie particularly liked the exploits of the Brazilian Jackie Silva, who always won even though she was not the best hitter, server, passer, blocker, or looker. But she was always in the right place doing the best thing, making miraculous saves and accidental winners.
“I’m going to be the Jackie Silva of Senate staffers,” Charlie told Joe.
But Joe had had enough of being in the house. “Go!” he said imperiously, hammering the front door with a diplodocus. “Go! Go! Go!”
“All right all right.”
His point was undeniable. They couldn’t stay in this house all day. “Let’s see. What shall we do. I’m tired of the park. Let’s go down to the Mall, we haven’t done that for a while. The Mall, Joe! But you have to get in your backpack.”
Joe nodded and tried to climb into his baby backpack immediately, a very tippy business. He was ready to party.
“Wait, let’s change your diaper first.”
“NO!”
“Ah come on Joe. Yes.”
“NO!”
“But yes.”
They fought like maniacs through a diaper change, each ruthless and determined, each shouting, beating, pinching. Charlie followed Jackie Silva’s lead and did the necessary things.
Red-faced and sweating, finally they were ready to emerge from the house into the steambath of the city. Out they went. Down to the Metro, down into that dim cool underground world.
It would have been good if the Metro pacified Joe as it once had Nick, but in fact it usually energized him. Charlie could not understand that; he himself found the dimness and coolness a powerful soporific. But Joe wanted to play around just above the drop to the power rail, he was naturally attracted to that enormous source of energy. The hundred-thousand-watt child. Charlie ran around keeping Joe from the edge, like Jackie Silva keeping the ball off the sand.
Finally a train came. Joe liked the Metro cars. He stood on the seat next to Charlie and stared at the concrete walls sliding by outside the tinted windows of the car, then at the bright orange or pink seats, the ads, the people in their car, the brief views of the underground stations they stopped in.
A young black man got on carrying a helium-filled birthday balloon. He sat down across the car from Charlie and Joe. Joe stared at the balloon, boggled by it. Clearly it was for him a kind of miraculous object. The youth pulled down on its string and let the balloon jump back up to its full extension. Joe jerked, then burst out laughing. His giggle was like his mom’s, a low gorgeous burbling. People in the car grinned to hear it. The young man pulled the balloon down again, let it go again. Joe laughed so hard he had to sit down. People began to laugh with him, they couldn’t help it. The young man was smiling shyly. He did the trick again and now the whole car followed Joe into paroxysms of laughter. They laughed all the way to Metro Center.
Charlie got out, grinning, and carried Joe to the Blue/Orange level. He marveled at the infectiousness of moods in a group. Strangers who would never meet again, unified suddenly by a youth and a toddler playing a game. By laughter. Maybe the real oddity was how much one’s fellow citizens were usually like furniture in one’s life.
Joe bounced in Charlie’s arms. He liked Metro Center ’s crisscrossing mysterious vastness. The incident of the balloon was already forgotten. It had been unremarkable to him; he was still in th
at stage of life where all the evidence supported the idea that he was the center of the universe, and miracles happened. Kind of like a U.S. Senator.
Luckily Phil Chase was not like that. Certainly Phil enjoyed his life and his public role, it reminded Charlie of what he had read about FDR’s attitude toward the presidency. But that was mostly a matter of being the star of one’s own movie; thus, just like everyone else. No, Phil was very good to work for, Charlie thought, which was one of the ultimate tests of a person.
Their next Metro car reached the Smithsonian station, and Charlie put Joe into the backpack and on his back, and rode the escalator up and out, into the kiln blaze of the Mall.
The sky was milky white everywhere. It felt like the inside of a sauna. Charlie fought his way through the heat to an open patch of grass in the shade of the Washington Monument. He sat them down and got out some food. The big views up to the Capitol and down to the Lincoln Memorial pleased him. Out from under the great forest. It was like escaping Mirkwood. This in Charlie’s opinion accounted for the great popularity of the Mall; the monuments and the big Smithsonian buildings were nice but supplementary, it was really a matter of getting out into the open. The ordinary reality of the American West was like a glimpse of heaven here in the green depths of the swamp.
Charlie knew and cherished the old story: how the first thirteen states had needed a capital, and so someone had to give up some land for it, or else one particular state would nab the honor; and Virginia and the other southern states were particularly concerned it would go to Philadelphia or New York. And so they had bickered, you give up some land, no you give it. No bureaucracy ever wanted to give up sovereignty over anything whatsoever, be it the smallest patch of sand in the sea; and so finally Virginia had said to Maryland, look, where the Potomac meets the Anacostia there’s a big nasty swamp. It’s worthless, dreadful, pestilent land. You’ll never be able to make anything out of a festering pit like that.
True, Maryland had said, you’re right. Okay, we’ll give that land to the nation for its capital. But not too much! Just a section of the worst part. And good luck draining it!
And so here they were. Charlie sat on grass, drowsing. Joe gamboled about him like a bumblebee, investigating things. The diffuse midday light lay on them like asthma. Big white clouds mushroomed to the west, and the scene turned glossy, bulging with internal light, like a computer photo with more pixels than the human eye could process. The ductile world, everything bursting with light. He really had to try to remember to bring his sunglasses on these trips.
To get a good long nap from Joe, he needed to tank him up. Charlie fought his own sleep, got the food bag out of the backpack’s undercarriage pocket, waved it so Joe could see it. Joe trundled over, eyelids at half-mast; there was no time to lose. He settled into Charlie’s lap and Charlie popped a bottle of Anna’s milk into his mouth just as his head was snapping to the side.
They were like zombies together: Joe sucked himself unconscious while Charlie slumped over him, chin on chest, comatose. Snuggling an infant in mind-numbing heat, what could be cozier.
Clouds over the White House were billowing up like the spirit of the building’s feisty inhabitant, round, dense, shiny white. In the other direction, over the Supreme Court’s neighborhood, stood a black nine-lobed cloud, dangerously laden with incipient lightning. Yes, the powers of Washington were casting up thermals and forming clouds over themselves, clouds that filled out precisely the shapes and colors of their spirits. Charlie saw that each cumulobureaucracy transcended the individuals who temporarily performed its functions in the world. These transhuman spirits all had inborn characters, and biographies, and abilities and desires and habits all their own; and in the sky over the city they contested their fates with one another. Humans were like cells in their bodies. Probably one’s cells also thought their lives were important and under their individual control. But the great bodies knew better.
Thus Charlie now saw that the White House was a great white thunderhead of a spirit, like an old emperor or a small-town sheriff, dominating the landscape and the other players. The Supreme Court on the other hand was dangerously dark and low, like a multiheaded minotaur, brooding and powerful. Over the white dome of the Capitol, the air shimmered; Congress was a roaring thermal so hot that no cloud could form in it.
Oh yes—there were big spirits above this low city, hammering one another like Zeus and his crowd, or Odin, or Krishna, or all of them at once. To make one’s way in a world like that one had to blow like the North Wind.
He had fallen into a slumber as deep as Joe’s when his phone rang. He answered it before waking, his head snapping dangerously on his neck.
“Wha.”
“Charlie? Charlie, where are you? We need you down here right now.”
“I’m already down here.”
“Really? That’s great. Charlie?”
“Yes, Roy?”
“Look, Charlie, sorry to bother you, but Phil is out of town and I’ve got to meet with Senator Ellington in twenty minutes, and we just got a call from the White House saying that Dr. Strangelove wants to meet with us to talk about Phil’s climate bill. It sounds like they’re ready to listen, maybe ready to talk too, or even to deal. We need someone to get over there.”
“Now?”
“Now. You’ve got to get over there.”
“I’m already over there, but look, I can’t. I’ve got Joe here with me. Where is Phil again?”
“ San Francisco.”
“Wasn’t Wade supposed to get back?”
“No he’s still in Antarctica. Listen Charlie, there’s no one here who can do this right but you.”
“What about Andrea?” Andrea Palmer was Phil’s legislative director, the person in charge of all his bills.
“She’s in New York today. Besides you’re the point man on this, it’s your bill more than anyone else’s and you know it inside and out.”
“But I’ve got Joe!”
“Maybe you can take Joe along.”
“Yeah right.”
“Hey, why not? Won’t he be taking a nap soon?”
“He is right now.”
Charlie could see the trees backing the White House, there on the other side of the Ellipse. He could walk over there in ten minutes. Theoretically Joe would stay asleep a couple of hours. And certainly they should seize the moment on this, because so far the President and his people had shown no interest whatsoever in dealing on this issue.
“Listen,” Roy cajoled, “I’ve had entire lunches with you where Joe is asleep on your back, and believe me, no one can tell the difference. I mean you hold yourself upright like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders, but you did that before you had Joe, so now he just fills up that space and makes you look more normal, I swear to God. You’ve voted with him on your back, you’ve shopped, you’ve showered, hey once you even made love with your wife while Joe was on your back, didn’t you tell me that?”
“What!”
“You told me that, Charlie.”
“I must have been drunk to tell you that, and it wasn’t really sex anyway. I couldn’t even move.”
Roy laughed his raucous laugh. “Since when does that make it not sex? You had sex with Joe in a backpack asleep on your back, so you sure as hell can talk to the President’s science advisor that way. Doctor Strangelove isn’t going to care.”
“He’s a jerk.”
“So? They’re all jerks over there but the President, and he is too but he’s a nice guy. And he’s the family President, right? He would approve on principle, you can tell Strengloft that. You can say that if the President were there he would love it. He would autograph Joe’s head like a baseball.”
“Yeah right.”
“Charlie, this is your bill!”
“Okay okay okay!” It was true. “I’ll go give it a try.”
So, by the time Charlie got Joe back on his back (the child was twice as heavy when asleep) and walked across the Mall and th
e Ellipse, Roy had made the calls and they were expecting him at the west entry to the White House. Joe was passed through security with a light-fingered shakedown that was especially squeamish around his diaper. Then they were through, and quickly escorted into a conference room.
The room was brightly lit, and empty. Charlie had never been in it before, though he had visited the White House several times. Joe weighed on his shoulders.
Dr. Zacharius Strengloft, the President’s science advisor, entered the room. He and Charlie had sparred by proxy several times before, Charlie whispering killer questions into Phil’s ear while Strengloft testified before Phil’s committee, but the two of them had never spoken one-on-one. Now they shook hands, Strengloft peering curiously over Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie explained Joe’s presence as briefly as he could, and Strengloft received the explanation with precisely the kind of frosty faux benevolence that Charlie had been expecting. Strengloft in Charlie’s opinion was a pompous ex-academic of the worst kind, hauled out of the depths of a second-rate conservative think tank when the administration’s first science advisor had been sent packing for saying that global warming might be real and not only that, amenable to human mitigations. That went too far for this administration. Their line was that no one knew for sure and it would be much too expensive to do anything about even if they were certain it was coming—everything would have to change, the power generation system, cars, a shift from hydrocarbons to helium or something, they didn’t know, and they didn’t own patents or already existing infrastructure for that kind of new thing, so they were going to punt and let the next generation solve their own problems in their own time. In other words, the hell with them. Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.
All this had become quite blatant since Strengloft’s appointment. He had taken over the candidate lists for most of the federal government’s science-advisory panels, and very quickly candidates were being routinely asked who they had voted for in the last election, and what they thought of stem-cell research and abortion and evolution. This had recently culminated in a lead industry defense witness being appointed to the panel for setting safety standards for lead in children’s blood, and immediately declaring that seventy micrograms per deciliter would be harmless to children, though the EPA’s maximum was ten. When his views were publicized and criticized, Strengloft had commented, “You need a diversity of opinions to get good advice.” Mentioning his name was enough to make Anna hiss.
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