Forty Signs of Rain sitc-1

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They were on the sidewalk flanking Wisconsin Avenue, next to the elevator box and the old post office. Passersby glanced at them. The foreman gave the woman his clipboard. “If you’d fill out and sign the report, please. Thanks. Looks like it was about half an hour from your call to when we pulled you.”

  “Pretty fast,” the woman said, reading the text on her form before filling in some blanks and signing. “It didn’t even seem that long.” She looked at her watch. “All right, well—thanks very much.” She faced Frank, extended a hand. “It was nice to meet you.”

  “Yes, it was,” Frank said, shaking her hand, struggling for words, struggling to think. In front of these witnesses nothing came to him, and she turned and walked south on Wisconsin. Frank felt constrained by the gazes of the three men; all would be revealed if he were to run after her and ask for her name, her phone number, and besides now the foreman was holding the clipboard out to him, and it occurred to him that he could read what she had written down there.

  But it was a fresh form, and he looked up to see that down the street she was turning right, onto one of the smaller streets west of Wisconsin.

  The foreman watched him impassively while the technicians went back to the elevator.

  Frank gestured at the clipboard. “Can I get that woman’s name, please?”

  The man frowned, surprised, and shook his head. “Not allowed to,” he said. “It’s a law.”

  Frank felt his stomach sink. There had to be a physiological basis for that feeling, some loosening of the gut as fear or shock prepared the body for fight-or-flight. Flight in this case. “But I need to get in touch with her again,” he said.

  The man stared at him, stone-faced. He had to have worked on that look in a mirror, it was like something out of the movies. Samuel L. Jackson perhaps.

  “Should have thought of that when you was stuck with her,” he said, sensibly enough. He gestured in the direction she had gone. “You could probably still catch her.”

  Released by these words Frank took off, first walking fast, then, after he turned right on the street she had taken, running. He looked forward down the street for her black skirt, white blouse, short brown hair; there was no sign of her. He began sweating hard again, a kind of panic response. How far could she have gotten? What had she said she was late for? He couldn’t remember—horribly, his mind seemed to have blurred on much that she had said before they started kissing. He needed to know all that now! It was like some memory experiment foisted on undergraduates, how much could you remember of the incidents right before a shock? Not much! The experiment had worked like a charm.

  But then he found the memory, and realized that it was not blurred at all, that on the contrary it was intensely detailed, at least up until the point when their legs had touched, at which point he could still remember perfectly, but only the feel on the outside of his knee, not their words. He went back before that, rehearsed it, relived it—cyclist, triathlon, one mile twenty mile ten k. Good for the legs, oh my God was it. He had to find her!

  There was no sign of her at all. By now he was on Woodson, running left and right, looking down all the little side streets and into shop windows, feeling more and more desperate. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He had lost her.

  It started to rain.

  * * *

  The doorbell rang. Anna went to the door and opened it.

  “Frank! Wow, you’re soaked.”

  He must have been caught in the downpour that had begun about half an hour before, and was already mostly finished. It was odd he hadn’t taken shelter during the worst of it. He looked like he had dived into a swimming pool with all his clothes on.

  “Don’t worry,” she said as he hesitated on the porch, dripping like a statue in a fountain. “Here, you need a towel for your face.” She provided one from the vestibule’s coat closet. “The rain really got you.”

  “Yeah.”

  She was somewhat surprised to see him. She had thought he was uninterested in the Khembalis, even slightly dismissive of them. And he had sat through the afternoon’s lecture wearing one of his signature looks—he had a kind of Jon Gruden face, able to express fifty minute gradations of displeasure, and the one at the lecture had been the one that said “I’m keeping my eyes from rolling in my head only by the greatest of efforts.” Not the most pleasant of expressions on anyone’s face, and it had only gotten worse as the lecture went on, until eventually he had looked stunned and off in his own world.

  On the other hand, he had gone to it. He had left in silence, obviously thinking something over. And now here he was.

  So Anna was pleased. If the Khembalis could capture Frank’s interest, they should be able to do it with any scientist. Frank was the hardest case she knew.

  Now he seemed slightly disoriented by his drenching. He was shaking his head ruefully.

  Anna said, “Do you want to change into one of Charlie’s shirts?”

  “No, I’ll be all right. I’ll steam dry.” Then he lifted his arms and looked down. “Well—maybe a shirt I guess. Will his fit me?”

  “Sure, you’re only just a bit bigger than he is.”

  She went upstairs to get one, calling down, “The others should be here any minute. There was flooding on Wisconsin, apparently, and some problems with the Metro.”

  “I know about those, I got caught in one!”

  “You’re kidding! What happened?” She came down with one of Charlie’s bigger T-shirts.

  “The elevator I was in got stuck halfway up.”

  “Oh no! For how long?”

  “About half an hour I guess.”

  “Jesus. That must have been spooky. Were you by yourself?”

  “No, there was someone else, a woman. We got to talking, and so the time passed fast. It was interesting.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Yes. It was. Only I didn’t get her name, and then when we got out they had forms for us to fill out and, and she took off while I was doing mine, so I never caught what hers was. And then the guy from the Metro wouldn’t give it to me from her form, so now I’m kicking myself, because—well. I’d like to talk to her again.”

  Anna inspected him, startled by this story. He was looking past her abstractedly, perhaps remembering the incident. He noticed her gaze and grinned, and this startled her once again, because it was a real smile. Always before Frank’s smile had been a skeptical thing, so ironic and knowing that only one side of his mouth tugged back. Now he was like a stroke victim who had recovered the use of the damaged side of his face.

  It was a nice sight, and it had to have been because of this woman he had met. Anna felt a sudden surge of affection for him. They had worked together for quite some time, and that kind of collaboration can take two people into a realm of shared experience that is not like family or marriage but rather some other kind of bond that can be quite deep. A friendship formed in the world of thought. Maybe they were always that way. Anyway he looked happy, and she was happy to see it.

  “This woman filled out a form, you say?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you can find out.”

  “They wouldn’t let me look at it.”

  “No, but you’ll be able to get to it somehow.”

  “You think so?”

  Now she had his complete attention. “Sure. Get a reporter from the Post to help you, or an archival detective, or someone from the Metro. Or from Homeland Security for that matter. The fact you were in there with her, that might be the way to get it, I don’t know. But as long as it’s written down, something will work. That’s informatics, right?”

  “True.” He smiled again, looking quite happy. Then he took Charlie’s shirt from her and walked around toward the kitchen while changing into it. He took another towel from her and toweled off his head. “Thanks. Here, can I put this in your dryer? Down in the basement, right?” He stepped over the baby gate, went downstairs. “Thanks Anna,” he called back up to her. “I feel better now.” When he came
back up, the sound of the dryer on behind him, he smiled again. “A lot better.”

  “You must have liked this woman!”

  “I did. It’s true, I did. I can’t believe I didn’t get her name!”

  “You will. Want a beer?”

  “You bet I do.”

  “In the door of the fridge. Oops, there’s the door again, here come the rest.”

  Soon the Khembalis and many other friends and acquaintances from NSF filled the Quiblers’ little living room and the dining room flanking it, and the kitchen beyond the dining room. Anna rushed back and forth from the yellow kitchen through the dining room to the living room, carrying drinks and trays of food. She enjoyed this, and was doing it more than usual to keep Charlie from doing too much and inflaming his poison ivy. As she hurried around she enjoyed seeing Joe playing with Drepung, and Nick discussing Antarctic dinosaurs with Curt from the office right above hers; he was one of the U.S. Antarctic Program managers. That NSF also ran one of the continents of the world was something she tended to forget, but Curt had come to the talk, and liked it. “These Buddhist guys would go over big in McMurdo,” he told Nick. Meanwhile Charlie, skin devastated to a brown crust across wide regions of his neck and face, eyes brilliantly bloodshot with sleep deprivation and steroids, was absorbed in conversation with Sucandra. Then he noticed her running around and joined her in the kitchen to help. “I gave Frank one of your shirts,” she told him.

  “I saw. He said he got soaked.”

  “Yes. I think he was chasing around after a woman he met on the Metro.”

  “What?”

  She laughed. “I think it’s great. Go sit down, babe, don’t move your poor torso, you’ll make yourself itchy.”

  “I’ve transcended itchiness. I’m only itchy for you.”

  “Come on don’t. Go sit down.”

  Only later in the evening did she see Frank again. He was sitting in the corner of the room, on the floor between the couch and the fireplace, quizzing Drepung about something or other. Drepung looked as if he was struggling to understand him. Anna was curious, and when she got a chance she sat down on the couch just above the two of them.

  Frank nodded to her and then continued pressing a point, using one of his catchphrases: “But how does that work?”

  “Well,” Drepung said, “I know what Rudra Cakrin says in Tibetan, obviously. His import is clear to me. Then I have to think what I know of English. The two languages are different, but so much is the same for all of us.”

  “Deep grammar,” Frank suggested.

  “Yes, but also just nouns. Names for things, names for actions, even for meanings. Equivalencies of one degree or another. So, I try to express my understanding of what Rudra said, but in English.”

  “But how good is the correspondence?”

  Drepung raised his eyebrows. “How can I know? I do the best I can.”

  “You would need some kind of exterior test.”

  Drepung nodded. “Have other Tibetan translators listen to the rimpoche, and then compare their English versions to mine. That would be very interesting.”

  “Yes it would. Good idea.”

  Drepung smiled at him. “Double blind study, right?”

  “Yes I guess so.”

  “Elementary, my dear Watson,” Drepung intoned, reaching out for a cracker with which to dip hummus. “But I expect you would get a certain, what, range. Maybe you would not uncover many surprises with your study. Maybe just that I personally am a bad translator. Although I must say, I have a tough job. When I don’t understand the rimpoche, translating him gets harder.”

  “So you make it up!” Frank laughed. His spirits were still high, Anna saw. “That’s what I’ve been saying all along.” He settled back against the side of the couch next to her.

  But Drepung shook his head. “Not making things up. Re-creation, maybe.”

  “Like DNA and phenotypes.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A kind of code.”

  “Well, but language is never just a code.”

  “No. More like gene expression.”

  “You must tell me.”

  “From an instruction sequence, like a gene, to what the instruction creates. Language to thought. Or to meaning, or comprehension. Whatever! To some kind of living thought.”

  Drepung grinned. “There are about fifty words in Tibetan that I would have to translate to the word ‘thinking.’”

  “Like Eskimos with ‘snow.’”

  “Yes. Like Eskimos have snow, we Tibetans have thoughts.”

  He laughed at the idea and Frank laughed too, shaken by that low giggle which was all he ever gave to laughter, but now emphatic and helpless with it, bubbling over with it. Anna could scarcely believe her eyes. He was as ebullient as if he were drunk, but he was still holding the same beer she had given him on his arrival. And she knew what he was high on anyway.

  He pulled himself together, grew intent. “So today, when you said, ‘An excess of reason is itself a form of madness,’ what did your lama really say?”

  “Just that. That’s easy, that’s an old proverb.” He said the sentence in Tibetan. “One word means ‘excess’ or ‘too much,’ you know, like that, and rig-gnas is ‘reason,’ or ‘science.’ Then zugs is ‘form,’ and zhe sdang is ‘madness,’ a version of ‘hatred,’ from an older word that was like ‘angry.’ One of the dug gsum, the Three Poisons of the Mind.”

  “And the old man said that?”

  “Yes. An old saying. Milarepa, I should think.”

  “Was he talking about science, though?”

  “The whole lecture was on science.”

  “Yeah yeah. But I found that idea in particular pretty striking.”

  “A good thought is one you can act on.”

  “That’s what mathematicians say.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “So, was the lama saying that NSF is crazy? Or that Western science is crazy? Because it is pretty damned reasonable. I mean, that’s the point. That’s the method in a nutshell.”

  “Well, I guess so. To that extent. We are all crazy in some way or other, right? He did not mean to be critical. Nothing alive is ever quite in balance. It might be he was suggesting that science is out of balance. Feet without eyes.”

  “I thought it was eyes without feet.”

  Drepung waggled his hand: either way. “You should ask him.”

  “But you’d be translating, so I might as well just ask you and cut out the middleman!”

  “No,” laughing, “I am the middleman, I assure you.”

  “But you can tell me what he would say,” teasing him now. “Cut right to the chase!”

  “But he surprises me a lot.”

  “Like when, give me an example.”

  “Well. One time last week, he was saying to me…”

  But at that point Anna was called away to the front door, and she did not get to hear Drepung’s example, but only Frank’s distinctive laughter, burbling under the clatter of conversation.

  By the time she ran into Frank again he was out in the kitchen with Charlie and Sucandra, washing glasses and cleaning up. Charlie could only stand there and talk. He and Frank were discussing Great Falls, both recommending it very highly to Sucandra. “It’s more like Tibet than any other place in town,” Charlie said, and Frank giggled again, more so when Anna exclaimed “Oh come on love, they aren’t the slightest bit the same!”

  “No, yes! I mean they’re more alike than anywhere else around here is like Tibet.”

  “What does that mean?” she demanded.

  “Water! Nature!” Then: “Sky,” Frank and Charlie both said at the same time.

  Sucandra nodded. “I could use some sky. Maybe even a horizon.” And all the men were chuckling.

  Anna went back out to the living room to see if anyone needed anything. She paused to watch Rudra Cakrin and Joe playing with blocks on the floor again. Joe was filled with happiness to have such company, stacking blocks and babblin
g. Rudra nodded and handed him more. They had been doing that off and on for much of the evening. It occurred to Anna that they were the only two people at the party who did not speak English.

  She went back to the kitchen and took over Frank’s spot at the sink, and sent Frank down to the basement to get his shirt out of the dryer. He came back up wearing it, and leaned against the counter, talking.

  Charlie saw Anna rest against the counter as well, and got her a beer from the fridge. “Here snooks have a drink.”

  “Thanks dove.”

  Sucandra asked about the kitchen’s wallpaper, which was an uncomfortably brilliant yellow, overlaid with large white birds caught in various moments of flight. When you actually looked at it it was rather bizarre. “I like it,” Charlie said. “It wakes me up. A bit itchy, but basically fine.”

  Frank said he was going to go home. Anna walked him around the ground floor to the front door.

  “You’ll be able to catch one of the last trains,” she said.

  “Yeah I’ll be okay.”

  “Thanks for coming, that was fun.”

  “Yes it was.”

  Again Anna saw that whole smile brighten his face.

  “So what’s she like?”

  “Well—I don’t know!”

  They both laughed.

  Anna said, “I guess you’ll find out when you find her.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said, and touched her arm briefly, as if to thank her for the thought. Then as he was walking down the sidewalk he looked over his shoulder and called, “I hope she’s like you!”

  * * *

  Frank left Anna and Charlie’s and walked through a warm drizzle back toward the Metro, thinking hard. When he came to the fateful elevator’s box he stood before it, trying to order his thoughts. It was impossible—especially there. He moved on reluctantly, as if leaving the place would put the experience irrevocably in the past. But it already was. Onward, past the hotel, to the stairs, down to the Metro entry level. He stepped onto the long escalator going down and descended into the earth, thinking.