But not all the ferals came in from the cold. And some of the stubbornest animals were among those least capable of surviving. The gibbons and siamangs were only going to the shelters that did not have trapdoors, and leaving them as soon as they had eaten. The gibbons continued to brachiate through the leafless trees. The siamangs had been seen walking around, their long arms raised over their heads to keep them from dragging on the ground; it looked like they were trying to find someone to surrender to, but if they saw people approaching they tarzanned away at high speed.
Both species were also now joining the ferals who were venturing out of the park into the residential neighborhoods nearby, finding sources of heat and food on their own; one siamang had been electrocuted while sleeping on a transformer, but now the rest didn’t do that anymore. The gibbons Bert and May and their sons had been reported sleeping in a kid’s backyard tree house.
“If they obviously don’t want to be recaptured,” Frank said to Nancy, “then we should help them from the shelters and let them stay feral.” He knew most of the FOG membership felt the same.
But Nancy only said, “I’m afraid that unless we bring them in, we’ll lose a lot of them.”
December days were too short. He tried to get in a brief animal walk at dawn; then it was over to work, where things were hectic as always. Along with the Gulf Stream project, Frank’s committee was involved with organizing a series of trials of various clean energy sources, especially solar; they were trying to determine which was closest to ready for mass production, the latest photovoltaics or flexible mirrors that redirected sunlight to elements that transformed the heat to electricity. Both showed some promise, and trials of the Stirling transformer were making the mirrors look unexpectedly competitive, although the various photovoltaics were always gaining in efficiency, and getting cheaper too. It seemed that one system or other might soon be ready for mass deployment, which would greatly reduce the amount of carbon still being tossed into the atmosphere.
Into these and other matters Frank threw himself, and the work days passed in their usual rush; and then in the dusk, or in full dark, he hiked down into the park and climbed his hanging ladder.
Recline on his groundpad, then, in the open doorway of his tent. Only when it was windy did he retreat fully inside. As long as the air remained still, his heavy sleeping bag had kept him warm on climbs in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic; it would do the same here. And the nights were too beautiful to miss. The highest branches spiked around him like a forest of giant thorns, the stars brilliant through their black calligraphy. He watched the stars, and read his laptop, or a paperback set under the lantern, until sleep came on him; then snuggled into the bag; slept well; woke serene, to the sight of the treetops bobbing and rustling on the dawn breeze. Lines of blackbirds flew out of town to look for food, under a flat sky of pewter and lead. Really the important thing was to be out in the world, to feel the wind and see the full spaciousness of being on a planet whirling through space. A feeling of beatitude; was that the right word? Sit up, click on the laptop, google “beatitude”; then there on the screen:
“beatitude dips from on high down on us and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds.”
My. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from a website called Emersonfortheday.net. Frank read a little more: quite amazing stuff. He bookmarked the site, which apparently featured a new thought from the philosopher’s writings every few days. Earlier samples read like some miraculously profound horoscope or fortune cookie. Reading them, Frank suddenly realized that the people who had lived before him in this immense hardwood forest had had epiphanies much like his. Emerson, the great Transcendentalist, had already sketched the parameters or the route to a new kind of nature-worshipping religion. His journal entries in particular suited Frank’s late night go-to-sleep reading, for the feel they had of someone thinking on the page. This was a good person to know about.
One night after he fell asleep skimming the site, his cell phone jolted him awake. “Hello?”
“Frank, it’s Caroline.”
“Oh good.” He was already sitting up.
“Can you come see me, in the same place?”
“Yes. When will you be there?”
“Half an hour.”
She was sitting on the same bench, under the bronze dancer. When she saw him approaching she stood, and they embraced. He felt her against him. For a long time they breathed in and out, their bodies pressed together. A lot was conveyed, somehow. He could feel that she had been having a hard time—that she was lonely—that she needed him, in the same way he needed her.
They sat on the bench, holding hands.
“So,” she said. “You’ve been traveling.”
“Yes?”
“Boston, Atlanta—Khembalung, even?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“But—I mean—I told you this Pierzinski was probably the reason you were listed, right? And Francesca Taolini is on the list too?”
“Yes, you did.” Frank shrugged. “I needed to talk to them. I couldn’t do my job without talking to them. So I thought I’d go ahead, and see if you noticed any, I don’t know—change in my status or whatever.”
“Yes. I did.”
“So, were we taped?”
“No. You mean beyond your office phones? No. Not yet.”
“Interesting.”
She gazed at him curiously. “You know, this could be serious. It’s not a game.”
“I know that, believe me. I’m not thinking of it as a game. More like an experiment.”
“But you don’t want to draw any more attention to yourself.”
“I suppose not, but why? What could they do to me?”
“Oh I don’t know. Every agency has its inspector general. You could suddenly find your travel expenses questioned, or your outside consulting. You could lose your job, if they really wanted to make it happen.”
“Then I’d just go back to UCSD.”
“I hope you don’t do that.”
He squeezed her hand. “Okay, but tell me more. How did my status change exactly?”
“You went up a level.”
“So my stock rose?”
“It did. But that’s a different issue. Your stock rose, fine, but that means it hit an amount that triggered your level of surveillance to go up. At that level, you’ll have more intrusive methods applied to you. It’s all set in the programs.”
“But why, what for?”
“I’m sure it’s something to do with Pierzinski, like you said last time. Taolini was really googling him after your trip to Boston, him and you both.”
“She was?”
“Yeah. She called up pretty much everything you’ve ever published. And lots of Pierzinski too. What did you two talk about?”
“She was on the panel I ran that reviewed Pierzinski’s proposal.”
“Yes, I know.”
“So, we talked about the work he’s doing, stuff like that.”
“She looks like she’s cute.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t know what to say. She laughed at him, squeezed his hand. Now that he was with her he understood that the others were all just displacements of his real desire. “So my calls are being recorded?”
“Your office calls, yes. I told you that last time.”
“I guess you did. And my cell phone?”
“They’re being recorded now too, but so far no one’s actually checking them. They’re just saved in your file. If you went up another level or two, they’d be there, and they’d get reviewed.”
“And what about my FOG phone?”
“No, not that one. Isn’t that just a walkie-talkie system?”
“Yeah.”
“Those only work off one tower. I have to call your cell, but I don’t like doing that a
nymore. I’m calling you from public phones, so someone would have to make a complete search of your file to find me, but I’m in there if they look hard enough. If someone knows my voice. . . Meanwhile, they can tell where you were when you got calls because of the towers involved.”
“So you know where I am?”
“To an extent. Your van is tagged too. I can see you’re spending time over near Rock Creek Park. Have you got a place over there?”
“Yes.”
“You must be renting a room? There aren’t any home arrangements showing. No water or electric or home phone or sewage.”
“No.”
“So you’re renting a room?”
“Like that, yes.”
She considered him. She squeezed his hand again. “I . . . well. I hope you trust me.”
“Oh I do. It’s just that I’m, I don’t know. Embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?”
“Yes. Only not really.” He met her gaze. “I live in a tree house. I’m out in Rock Creek Park, living up in a little tree house I built.”
She laughed. Then she leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Good for you! Will you take me up to it sometime?”
“Oh yes,” he said, warming. “I’d like that very much.”
She was still leaning into him. They leaned, wordlessly feeling the pressure of arm against arm. Then they shifted, and suddenly were kissing.
It all came instantly back to him, how it felt. He fell headlong back into the space they had occupied when they were trapped in the elevator, as though the intervening months had vanished and they were back there again in an eternal now, passionately making out. Nowhere but in their little bubble universe.
After some indeterminate time, they paused for breath. Such intensity could not be maintained; it had to lead somewhere else, either forward to orgasm or backward to talk. And since they were out on a park bench; since there were still so many questions pricking at other parts of his mind; he fell back toward talk. He wanted to know more—
But then she pulled him back to her to kiss again, and obviously that was a much better idea. Passion blew through him again, sexual passion, my God who could explain it? Who could even remember what it was like?
Again it went on for some time, he couldn’t have said how long. The night was cold, her fingers were cool. The city rumbled around them. Distant siren. He liked the feel of her body under her clothes: ribby ribs, soft breasts. The iron solidity of her quads. She squeezed him, gasped and murmured a little, all through their kisses.
Again they came up for air.
“Oh my,” she said. She shifted on the bench, conformed herself to him like a cat.
“Yes.”
His questions slowly resurfaced. He looked down at her face, tucked against his shoulder.
“Are you staying with your friends again?”
“Yes.” She looked at her watch. “Uh oh.”
“What time is it?”
“Four.”
“Wow. The witching hour.”
“Yes.”
“When do you have to be back?”
“Soon.”
“And . . . look, is there some way I can call you? Is your phone tapped?”
“Maybe.” She hesitated. “I don’t want to use it for anything important.”
“Ah.” He thought about it. “There must be some protocols you guys use. . . .”
She shook her head quickly. “It really isn’t like that in my department. Although sure, there are methods. We could use phone cards and public phones.”
“We’d have to synchronize.”
“Right, but that’s part of the method.”
“Fridays at nine kind of thing.”
“Right. Let’s do that. Let’s find pay phones we think will work, maybe get a few numbers from a few in a row, so there would be alternates. We’ll share them next time I get a chance to call you, and after that we won’t be putting anything on your phone. You might get bumped up again any time, the way things are going in the market. You guys are really impressing the investors.” She looked at her watch. “Ah hell.”
She twisted into him, kissed him again. “Hmmm,” she said after a while. “I’ve gotta go. . . .”
“That’s okay.”
“Sorry.”
“I understand. You’ll call?”
“Yes. When I can. Get those pay phone numbers ready.”
“I will.”
One last kiss and she was off into the night.
OOOP OOP!
Now Frank went fully optimodal. For a few days he even experienced the “walking on air” phenomenon, which was surely a physiological effect caused by an incomplete integration of happiness into sense data. Life in his tree, in the winter forest, at the gym, at work, in the restaurants he frequented, out in the brief hour of pale winter evening sun, running or throwing the disks or stalking animals—every day parcellated but full, every night a forest adventure, always alive, always generous. Ooop!
How big the world became in a wind. Everything expanded, inside and out. Hike in the dreamlike black forest, huge and blustery. Evening sky over the black branches, violet in the east shading to aquamarine in the west, all luminous, a Maxfield Parrish sky, only now it was obvious that Parrish had never exaggerated at all, but only done his best to suggest a reality that was so much more vivid and intense than any art.
One evening he tromped into 21 not long after sunset and found only Zeno and Redbeard and Fedpage and a couple more. “Where is everybody?”
“Over on Connecticut.”
“Seeking the heat, man.”
“What about Chessman, where’s he?”
Shrugs all around.
“Haven’t seen him for a while.”
“I bet he found a place to stay for the winter. He’s smart.”
“Come and go, Doctor Checkmate, come and go.”
Frank couldn’t read their attitude. He wondered if the chess hustlers at Dupont Circle might know where Chessman was, and resolved to visit and see. There was nothing more to be learned here.
Snow began to fall, small flakes ticking down. After the first heavy snowfall there had been little more of it; and it was usually this kind of frozen frost, swirling on the wind. The bros noted it gloomily, then wandered off. They had actually built the little shelters Zeno had proposed, Frank saw, in the dip they now called Sleepy Hollow, just to the west of the site. Some of them were already tucked into their low shelters, staring out red-eyed at the fire and the snowflakes. Cardboard, trashbags, branches, sheets of plywood, drop cloths, two-by-fours, cinder blocks: under that, dirty nylon or even cotton sleeping bags, toeing into snowbanks. You needed a groundpad under a sleeping bag for it to work.
Frank found himself annoyed. Living like rats when they didn’t have to; it was incompetent. Even if it was all they could find to build with.
It was hard to judge what was happening with them. One time Frank was running with the frisbee guys, completely absorbed in it, when they came into 21 and there was a quartet of young black men, wearing multiple cotton hooded sweatshirts, hands deep in their pockets. Spencer pulled up sharply and turned to the tables. “Hey how’s it going?”
“Oh good!” Zeno said sarcastically. “Real good! These brothers are wondering if we have any drugs to sell.”
“You guys?” Spencer laughed, and Robert and Robin echoed him as they flanked him on both sides, their golf disks held before them like Oddjob’s hat. Frank was just comprehending the situation when the young men joined the laughter, smiles flashing in the gloom, and headed down Ross without a farewell.
“Catch you guys,” Spencer said as he moved on to the next tee.
“Yeah, catch you,” Zeno growled. “Fucking drop by any time.”
At work that week, a group from NOAA came over to share their analysis of the Gulf Stream stall. They had done the calculations and modeling necessary to say something quantitative about the idea of restarting the far north downwelling, and Diane had asked
General Wracke and several members of the Science Board to attend. The NOAA PI ran them through a quick recap of the problem: fresh-water cap introduced onto the surface of the far north Atlantic, reducing salinity and raising the water temperature both; normal temperatures for this month averaged -1.2° C, so melted ice actually warmed it. Density was a function of salinity and temperature combined, which was why the movement of seawater was called the thermohaline cycle. Before the fleet of Arctic icebergs had arrived, the surface in the downwelling regions had had an average salinity of 31.0 p.s.u. (practical salinity units; these were measured in various ways, but a p.s.u. was still roughly equivalent to how many grams of salt per kilogram of water). Now the surface salinity was 29.8, the temperature -1.0° C. Following the PI’s red laser dot down the isopycnals on her graph, they could see just how much salinity would have to be bumped to make the cap dense enough to sink down into the water underneath it.
The biggest downwelling region had been north of Iceland and east of Greenland, but the PI explained that all that region was not equally involved. Currents branching from the great current had flowed north and east almost to the coast of Norway, then turned left toward Greenland in very predictable currents, slowing and then swirling down in giant whirlpools that were thirty or fifty kilometers wide, but only three or four centimeters deep. These whirlpools were visible only to satellite laser altimetry, where false-color graphing could make them psychedelically obvious. They had been relatively stable in location, presumably constrained by the sea bottom, the nearest coastline configurations, the force of the currents, and the Coriolis force.
They were small areas compared to the total surface of the ocean, so that the idea of restarting the current did not seem immediately impossible; but as the PI pointed out, one could not restart the circulation merely by increasing density at the old downwelling sites in isolation, separated from the thrust of the Gulf Stream by some hundreds of kilometers of stalled and unusually fresh water. It would be necessary to draw the full momentum of the Gulf Stream back up to the old sites again, by causing surface water to sink just north of the current downwelling sites, then continue the process, in Pied Piper fashion, until they had drawn the Gulf Stream up behind them and could dump as much as needed in the old downwelling locations. This was the only method that the NOAA team could think of to renew the flow; but it added greatly to the amount of water that they had to make sink. To “isopycnalate,” as Edgardo called it.
Fifty Degrees Below Page 28
