Fifty Degrees Below sitc-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Frank could not be more set; he was probably the best-dressed man in the city. He was the Alpine man, come back to life! And his goal, Johnny Appletentlike, was to get everybody else living out-of-doors into gear that was at least adequate. Into shelters at night if the cold was too much. It was no easy task, because it called not only for acquisition of gear that was disappearing fast from all the thrift shops (though people didn’t recognize wool, apparently), but the money to fund it. He used a grant from the zoo’s feral fund, among other things, considering mat with that name it was not even a case of reprogrammed funds. But the distribution of the gear could be tricky. No one liked gratitude, but many people were cold enough to take what he gave them. Cotton and cardboard were no longer hacking it. The stubborn ones were likely to die. The newspapers reported that a few hundred already had. Frank could scarcely believe some of the stories in the Post about the dumb things people had done and were still doing. They could be six inches from safety and not recognize it. It was as John Muir had said of the Donner Party; a perfectly fine winter base camp, botched by ineptitude. But they didn’t know. It was a technique, and if you didn’t have it you died. It wasn’t rocket science but it was mandatory.

  Frank had to be careful not to get careless himself. He stayed out all day every day, and part of him was beginning to think he had it wired, so that he spent longer sessions out. Sometimes he discovered he was so ravenous or thirsty that he was going to keel over; he blew into the coffee shops shivering hard, only to discover white patches on his chin, and fiendishly pinpricking fingers and ears. God knew what was happening to his poor nose. Emergency infusions of hot chocolate, then, blowing across the top and burning his mouth to gulp some down, burning his esophagus, feeling his insides burning while his extremities fizzed with cold. Hot chocolate was the perfect start on a return to proper heat and energy. Cinnamon rolls too; he was coming to believe that cinnamon was a powerful stimulant and that it also allowed him to see better in the black-and-white of his dawn and dusk patrols. Shifting dapple under cloudy moonlight, it didn’t matter to him now, he saw the structure of Washington, D.C., and Rock Creek Park underneath all that chiaroscuro, high on the magic spice.

  One night he found the bros back in the park, around a very hospitable bonfire. Just outside the light the body of a deer lay partly skinned, steaks hacked out of its flank.

  “—so fucking cold it made me stupid.”

  “Like that’s what did it.”

  “—I couldn’t even talk for a couple days. Like my tongue was froze. Then I could talk, but I only knew like ten words.”

  “That happened to me,” Fedpage put in. “I started talking in old English, and then German. You know, ‘Esh var kalt.’ The Germans really know how to say it. And then it was just grunts and moans for a while. ‘Fur esh var kallllt.’ ”

  “You’re funny Fedpage. You were wasted in Vietnam.”

  “I was indeed wasted in Vietnam.”

  Fluctuating radiant pulses of heat washed over their faces.

  Frank sat by the fire and watched it burn. “So you guys really were in Vietnam.”

  “Of course.”

  “You must be pretty old then.”

  “We are pretty old then! Fuck you. How the fuck old are you?”

  “Forty-three.”

  “What a kid.”

  “We’re twice as old as that, kid. No wonder your nose bleeds.”

  “In point of fact I’m fifty-eight,” said Fedpage.

  “Boomer scum.”

  “Yeah, he went to the University of Vietnam.”

  “So what was it like?”

  “It was fucked! What do you think?”

  “At least it wasn’t cold,” Zeno said dourly. “It might have been fucked but at least you didn’t freeze your dick off.”

  “I told you to put a sock down there.”

  “Put a sock on it! Good idea!”

  Fedpage, solemn, calculating: “I would need one of them knee socks.”

  General mirth. Discussion of burning needle sensation during penile thawing. Listing of exceptional cases of genital trauma. Frank watched Zeno brood. Zeno noticed and snapped, “It was fucked, man.”

  “It was everything,” Fedpage said.

  “That’s true. It was every kind of thing. There were some guys over there who joined up specifically to kill people. Some people were like that. But most of them weren’t, and for them it was hell. They didn’t know what hit them. We just did what we were told and tried to stay alive.”

  “Which we did.”

  “But we were lucky! It was sheer dumb luck. When we were in Danang we could just as easily been over-run.”

  “What happened there?” Frank said.

  “We got caught by the Tet offensive—”

  “He don’t know about any of that. We were cut off, okay? We were surrounded in a town and we got hammered. They killed a lot of us and they would have killed all of us except the Air Force made some passes. Bombed the shit out of those NVA.”

  “Dropped us food too.”

  “That’s right, we were going to starve as well as get massacred. It was a race to see which. Incompetent bastards.”

  “We shared the last food, remember that?”

  “Of course. A fucking spoonful. Didn’t do any of us a bit of good.”

  “It was a team thing. You should have seen Zeno the time we heloed down into a minefield and the medic wouldn’t get out to help some wounded. Zeno just jumped out and ran right across that minefield, he led those brothers back in just like there weren’t no mines out there. Even after one of them went off and dee-exed a guy who didn’t follow right in his footsteps.”

  “You did that?” Frank said.

  “Yeah well,” Zeno said. He looked away, shrugged. “That was my Zeno’s paradox moment I guess. I mean if you’re always only halfway there, then you can’t ever step on no mine, right?”

  Frank laughed.

  “It was great,” Fedpage insisted.

  “No it wasn’t. It was just what it was. Then you get back to the States and it’s all like some bad movie. Some stupid fucking sitcom. That’s America man. It’s all such bullshit. People act like they’re such big deals, they act like all their rules are real when really they’re just bullshit so they can keep you down and take everything for themselves.”

  “True,” Fedpage said.

  “Ha ha. Well, here we are. Looks like the fire is about halfway down. Who’s going to go get more wood for this fire, I ain’t gonna do it.”

  “So did you ever go up to the shelter?”

  “Sure.”

  The hard wind finally struck as forecast, and it got bad again for a couple days, as bad as in the beginning. “It ain’t the cold, it’s the—”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Frozen branches snapped and fell all over town, on people, cars, power lines, rooftops. Frank went out every day and helped Cutter and his crew. Then one day, clearing a fallen tree from a downed power line, a branch swung his way and thwacked him on the face.

  “Oh sorry I couldn’t get that! Hey Frank! Hey are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” Frank said, hands at his face. He still couldn’t feel his nose. He tasted blood at the back of his throat, swallowed. It was nothing new. It happened from time to time. It even tasted like old blood, left over from the original injury. He shook it off, kept on carrying wood.

  The next morning, however, he got out of his van and walked up and down Connecticut, and—he couldn’t decide what to do. Time for a leap before you look, therefore; do whatever came to hand. But where to start?

  He never got started. He walked up Connecticut to Chevy Chase Circle, then back down to the zoo. How big the world became when it tasted like blood.

  He stopped at a stoplight to think it over. He could help at the zoo, or he could help Cutter, or he could look for Chessman, or he could help at the shelter, or he could go to work, or he could go for a run, or a hike, or a climb. Or he could read a book.
His current reading was The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder, a real beauty, the story of a small Dakota town surviving the extreme winter of 1880. The town had lost all contact with the rest of humanity, cut off by huge snowpacks from October to May. Talk about island refugia! He had gotten to the part where they were almost starving.

  So he could read. He could sit in a coffee shop and read his book, and no one would have any reason to object. Or he could go work out at the club. Or…

  He was still standing aimlessly at the corner of Connecticut and Tilden when his cell phone rang.

  It was Nick Quibler. School had been cancelled for the day, and he was wondering if Frank was available to go on a FOG hunt.

  “I sure am,” Frank croaked. “Thanks for thinking of it.”

  * * *

  When Charlie got home from the grocery store, where the shelves had been largely empty, Anna and Joe were out, but Nick was already back, playing his gameboy.

  “Hey Nick, how was your FOG trip with Frank?”

  “Oh. Well, it wasn’t a big accident.”

  “Uh oh.” This phrase was a family joke, recalling a time when a much younger Nick had tried to delay telling his parents about something bad he had caused to happen at preschool; but this time Nick wasn’t smiling. Curiously focused on his gameboy, in fact. “What do you mean it wasn’t a big accident?”

  “Well, you know. No people got hurt.”

  “That’s good, but what did happen?”

  “Well. You know. It wasn’t so good for one of the gibbons.”

  “Uh oh, how so?”

  “One died.”

  “Oh no! How did it happen?” Hand to Nick’s shoulder; Nick stayed focused on the game. “What happened, bud?”

  “Well you see, it’s too cold for them now.”

  “I bet! That’s true for a lot of the animals, right?”

  “Right. And so they have these heated shelters out in the park, and all the animals are using them now, but some of the animals are hard to catch even when they do use them. The gibbons and siamangs are like that, they sit on the roofs and run away if you try to get close, and some of them have died. They found two of them frozen. So they decided they better try to capture the ones still out there, before they died too.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Yeah, but they’re really hard to get near. They swing through the trees? It’s really cool. So you have to kind of hunt them down if you want to, you know.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “Yeah. You have to shoot them with a tranquilizer dart.”

  “Oh yeah. I used to see that on Wild Kingdom.”

  “They do it on Animal Planet all the time.”

  “Do they. That’s good to know. That’s continuity. But I remember one time when I was a kid, this hippo got out of Lion Country Safari, and they shot it with too much.”

  “No, not that.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, they’re always up in the trees. And Frank is the only one who can really get very close to them.”

  “Ha. Our Frank is something.”

  “Yeah, he can sound just like them. And he can walk without making any noise. It’s really cool.”

  “How the heck does he do that?”

  “He looks where he’s going! I mean he walks along and his face is pointed right down at the ground most of the time.”

  “Like a dog?”

  “No, more like a bird. He’s always looking around, zip zip, you know.”

  “Ah yeah. And so?”

  “So we were up by Military Road and we got a call that someone had spotted a gibbon pair near the Nature Center going down toward the creek, so we went down the creekbed, you can walk right on the ice, and we got in those rocks down by the creek?”

  “Which?”

  “The Nook and Cranny rocks, you can see through the cranny upstream, and so we laid in wait for a while and—”

  “What do you do when you’re lying in wait?”

  “We just stand there real quiet. You can be careful about how you breathe, it’s pretty cool.”

  “Ah yeah. And so then?”

  “So then three gibbons came past us, and they weren’t up very high and Frank had the gun balanced on the Nook and was ready for them. He shot one right in the butt, but then some people yelled.”

  “Other FOG people?”

  “No, just we didn’t know who, and the gibbons took off and Frank took off running after them.”

  “Didn’t you too?”

  “Yeah I did, but he was fast. I couldn’t keep up. So but neither could he, not with the gibbons, they just fly along, but the one he shot fell. From way up there.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh no. So Frank couldn’t.

  “No, he tried but he couldn’t keep up. He wasn’t there to catch it.”

  “So it died?”

  “Yeah. Frank picked it up. He checked it out.”

  “He was hoping it was still alive.”

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t. It got killed by the fall. I mean it looked okay, but it was… loose. It wasn’t there.”

  “Oh no. How awful. What did Frank do?”

  “He was kind of upset.”

  * * *

  The bare branches overhead were like black lightning bolts striking out of the Earth into the clouds. Like decision maps, first choose this, then that. He was cold, cold in his head somehow. All his thoughts congealed. Maybe if he weren’t injured. Maybe next winter. Maybe if it wasn’t a long winter. Maybe they all had to find their cave. Fur esh var kalt.

  Wind ripped through the branches with a sound like tearing cloth. A big sound. Under it the city hummed almost inaudibly. Snow cracked as he stepped on it. There was no way to walk quietly now. The branches overhead were like black fireworks, flailing the sky. He moved under them toward the gorge, shifting his weight one pound at a time.

  Eventually he came to one of the heated shelters. Little square hut, its open side facing south. Hot box; all interior surfaces emanated heat. Like a big toaster oven left open. A bad thought, given the way toaster ovens worked.

  Inside, and scattered around the opening, they stood or sat or lay. Rabbits, raccoons, deer, elands, tapirs, even foxes, even a bobcat. Two ibex. None meeting the eye of any other; all pretending they were each alone, or with only their own kind. As on an island created in a flood, it was a case of stay there or die. Truce. Time out.

  Very slowly he approached. He kept his head down, his eyes to the side. He sidled. He crabbed. Shoulders hunched lower and lower. He turned his back to them entirely as he closed on them, and sat down in the lee of the shelter, about fifteen feet out from it, in a little hollow floored with snow. He shifted back toward them to get off the snow, onto a decomposed black log. Fairly dry, fairly comfortable. The heat from the shelter was palpable, it rushed over him intermittently on the wind, like a stream. He rested his head on his chest, arms around his knees. A long time passed; he wasn’t sleepy, but long intervals passed during which no thoughts came to him. A gust of chill air roused him, and he shifted so he could see more of the shelter out of the corner of his eye. At the very edge of his peripheral vision lay what could have been the jaguar.

  The animals were not happy. They all stared at him, wary, affronted. He was messing up a good situation. The lion had lain down with the lamb, but the man was not welcome. He wanted to reassure them, to explain to them that he meant no harm, that he was one of them. But there were no words.

  Much later there was a crack, a branch breaking. In a sudden flurry many animals slipped away.

  Frank looked up. It was Drepung, and Charlie Quibler. They approached him, crouched by his side. “Come with us, Frank,” Drepung said.

  VIII. ALWAYS GENEROUS

  The scientific literature on the effects of damage to the prefrontal cortex was vast. Its existence bespoke a variety and quantity of human suffering that was horrible to contemplate, but never mind; it was rehearsed here in the cour
se of attempting to reduce that suffering. Among the cases discussed were traumas so much worse than what Frank had experienced that he felt chastened, abashed, lucky, frightened. He wasn’t even sure his brain had been injured. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t just a broken nose and the taste of blood at the back of his throat. Not much compared to an iron spike through the skull.

  Nevertheless it was his injury, and how he felt about it was now also part of the symptomatology, because emotions were generated or coordinated or felt in the prefrontal cortex, and so the precise kind of emotional change experienced was an indication of what trauma might have occurred. The dysfunction could be very precise and limited: some subjects were rendered incapable of compassion or embarrassment but could still feel happiness or fear, others felt no dismay or even laughed at crippling disabilities they were quite aware of, and so on. Trauma victims thus became in effect experiments, testing what happened if you removed parts of a very complex system.

  Frank clicked and read apprehensively, reminding himself that knowledge was power. “Fear and Anxiety: possible roles of the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis.” “Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala.” The amygdala was behind the nose, a little distance in. A famous case of short-term amnesia had been nicked in the amygdala when a fencing foil went in through his nose.