Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “You’re going to bleed anyway.” She poked gently at his back.

  “How the hell did they get it in me?”

  “Don’t know. When you hurt your nose did you go to a hospital?”

  “Yes. I was there for a few hours.”

  “Maybe that was when. Okay, here it is. Hold steady.”

  Then a quick cut. Frank held himself immobile. Now she was wiping off his back with her fingers, and kissing his spine at the base of his neck. She ripped open a little square Band-Aid and applied it to the spot.

  “You thought of everything,” he said.

  “I hope so.”

  “What about you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He picked up the wand.

  “Oh that. I think I’m okay.”

  But he ran it over her anyway, and it beeped over her back.

  Her mouth tightened to a hard line. “Shit.”

  “It wasn’t there before?”

  “No.” She ripped off her jacket, took the wand and ran it over it. No beep. She pulled her shirt off over her head; shocking lovely curve of freckled white skin, spine deep in a furrow of muscles, ribs, shoulder blades, the curve of her right breast in its bra cup as she faced away from him. He ran the wand over her back, listened for the beep, watched for the green lights on its black face. Like finding the stud in a wall; but nothing. He ran it over her crumpled shirt and it beeped. “Ah ha.”

  “Okay,” she said, spreading the shirt out and inspecting it. “That’s good. Here. It’ll just be a few millimeters long.” She ran the wand closely over the shirt, inspected the part under the beeping. “In a seam . . . yep. Here it is.” She cut with a pair of keychain scissors, held up a tiny black cylinder, like a tiny bike pump valve stopper.

  “Maybe there’s another one in your bra,” Frank suggested, and she laughed and leaned forward to kiss him; and then they were hugging hard, kissing lightly, she only brushing her lips against his, murmuring, “Oh, oh, it must hurt—watch out, I’m going to hurt you,” and him replying, “It’s all right, it’s all right, kiss me.”

  They got off the rest of their clothes and onto his groundpad, under his unzipped sleeping bags. All warm and cozy and yet still bobbing on the wind. Finally completing the dive that they had launched in their stuck elevator, so many months before; they finally fell in and were both seized up in it together. This was Frank’s overriding impression, to the extent he had any thoughts at all; the togetherness of it. She kissed him gingerly, squeezed him hard, as sure with her caresses as she had been with her little surgery. Frank began to bleed again down the back of his throat, he tasted blood and was afraid she could too.

  “I’m going to bleed on you I’m afraid.”

  “Here—let’s turn over.”

  She straightened her left leg under his right, and they rolled to that side together as if they had done it a thousand times before; then crabbed back onto the mattress pad. Frank swallowed blood, held her as she moved on him. Off they went again.

  Afterward she lay beside him, her head on his chest. He could feel that she could hear his heartbeat. He ran his fingers through the tight curls of her hair. “Wow.”

  “I know.”

  “I needed that.”

  “Me too.” She shifted her head to look at him. “How long has it been for you?”

  Frank calculated. Marta, the last time . . . quite some time before she moved out. Some of those last times had been very strange: sex as hatred, sex as despair. Usually he managed not to know that a nearly eidetic memory of those encounters had been seared into him, but now he glimpsed them, quickly shoved them away again in his mind. “About a year and a half?”

  “It’s been four years for me.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right.” She made a face. “I told you. We don’t get along.”

  “But . . .”

  “I know. That’s just the way it is. He has other interests.”

  “Someone else, you mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But that chip in your shirt?”

  “That was him.”

  “So—he keeps tabs on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  She shrugged. “Just to do it. I don’t know really. He started working with another agency, and it seems to have gotten worse since then. He’s always been kind of obsessive. It’s a control thing.”

  “So this new job is with another security agency?”

  “Oh yes. I think it’s linked to Homeland Security, maybe just a black-black inside it.”

  “So, these chips. Will he know you’ve been here?”

  “No, he would have to be following me. The chips ping back a radio signal with their information and location, but the range isn’t very big. It’s getting bigger though, and they’ve been installing a network of transmitters that will give comprehensive coverage in the capital area. But it hasn’t been activated yet, as far as I know. I think you still need to be tracking to get a bounce from a chip. Not that he wouldn’t do that too. But he’s out of town.”

  Frank didn’t know what to say.

  Long silence. They let it go. There they were, after all, just the two of them. Rocking back and forth. She lay her head on his chest. Back and forth, back and forth.

  “This feels so good. It’s like being in a cradle.”

  “Yes,” Frank said. “You can tell which direction the wind is coming from. See, it’s coming from the north, from behind our head. When it swings toward our feet, there’s a little pause at the end, while the wind holds it out there. Then it springs back with an extra little push, like it’s been released. Whereas behind our heads we’re going into the wind, so it slows sooner and makes the turnaround quicker, with no extra acceleration from the release. See, feel that?”

  “No.” She giggled.

  “Feel it again. Downwind, upwind, downwind, upwind. They’re different.”

  “Hmm. So they are. Like a little hitch.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s like clocks going tick tock. Supposedly there’s hardly any difference between the two sounds.”

  “True.” Frank felt a deep breath fill him, lifting her head. “I’m glad you don’t think I’m crazy.”

  “Me? I’m in no position to think anyone else is crazy. I am fully out there myself.”

  “Maybe we all are now.”

  “Maybe so.”

  They lay there, swaying back and forth. Please time stop now. The wind strummed the forest; they could hear individual gusts sweep across the watershed. Creaking branches, the occasional snap and crash, all within a huge airy whoosh, keening and hooting, filling everything with its continuo.

  They talked quietly about tree houses. She told him all about the one in her backyard, her nights out, her tea parties, her cats, a neighborhood raccoon, a possum. “I thought it was a big rat. It scared me to death.”

  Frank told her about his love for the Swiss Family tree house at Disneyland. “I had a plan to hide when the park closed. Tom Sawyer Island was divided by a fence, with a maintenance area north of the public part. I was sure I could swing around the fence and hide, but then I would be stuck on the island. I decided in the summer that would be okay, I could swim over to Frontierland and sneak through New Orleans to the tree. Clothes on my head, towel, the whole bit. I practiced swimming without my arms.”

  She laughed. “Why didn’t you do it?”

  “I couldn’t think of anything to tell my parents. I didn’t want them to worry.”

  “Good boy.”

  “Well, I would have gotten in such trouble.”

  “True.”

  Later she said, “Do you think we could open the tent and look at the stars? Would we get blasted by wind?”

  “Somewhat. We can move halfway out and zip down the tent door. I do that a lot.”

  “Okay let’s try it.”

  He zipped open the tent. The cold poured in on them, and they bundled into the sleep
ing bag. Frank zipped it up until only their faces emerged from the hood of the bag. Set properly on the groundpad they started to warm up against each other. They kissed as much as Frank’s face could handle, which was not much. When they started to make love they fell into it more languorously. They moved with the sway of the tree in the wind, a slow back and forth, like being on a train or truly huge waterbed. But this was too perfect and they started to laugh, they had to break rhythm with the tree and they did.

  Afterward he said, “What should I do about these chips?”

  “I’ll leave you this wand. You can get completely clear, and they might not have this spot GPSed. Could you move to another tree, with stuff you’re sure is clean?”

  “I guess so. It’s all pretty modular, sure.” Frank realized he had grown fond of his tree, even though there were ten thousand others just like it all around him.

  “That way, if you kept it a clean site, they wouldn’t know where you were. When you were away from your van, anyway.”

  “I’d have to leave a lot of stuff in the van.”

  “They would think you were living in it. You’d have to wand yourself when you came up here, and see if you’d picked anything up. If you wanted to be serious about it, you’d get rid of the van and cell phone, and only use public stuff, and buy everything with cash. We call it devolving.”

  Frank laughed. “I’ve been trying to do that anyway.”

  “I can see that. But you’d have to do it in this other area.”

  He nodded. He put his face into the hair on the top of her head. Tight curls, a kind of lemon and cypress shampoo; he felt her body on his, and another jolt of desire ran through him. She was helping him. She was strong, bold, interested. She liked him, she wanted him. After four years she would probably want anybody, but now it was him.

  “What about you?” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “So does your, does he know that you know he’s spying on you?”

  “He must.” Her grimace as underlit by Frank’s floor lamp gave her the look of one of the Khembali demon masks: fear, despair, anger. Seeing it Frank felt a wave of deep dislike for her husband pour through him. He wanted to get rid of him. Remove him like a chip. Protect her, make her happy—

  “—but we don’t talk about it,” she was saying.

  “That sounds bad.”

  “It is bad. I need to get out of there. But there are some complications having to do with his new job. Some things I need to do first.” She fell silent, and her body, though still on top of his, was not melted into him as before. This was another new sensation, her otherness, naked and on top of him. He shivered and pulled the down bag back over their heads.

  “So you got your pay-phone numbers.”

  “Yes.” He had remembered despite the injury.

  “And when will we talk?”

  “Nine P.M. every Friday?”

  “Sure. And if we have to miss for some reason, the next week for sure, and if we miss again, I’ll call your cell phone.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  Her warmth coursed into him. Up in the tree they hugged each other. This moment of the storm.

  “Oh good,” he said.

  LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK.

  Now winter was here in earnest. A series of brutal storms fell on the city, like the ones that had struck London only drier, all of them windy and cold, not very much snow, but that only made them seem colder. Kenzo said there hadn’t been a winter like this since the Younger Dryas; it was worse than the Little Ice Age of the fourteenth century, a true North Atlantic stall event. Average temperatures in eastern North America and western Europe down by a full thirty degrees Fahrenheit.

  Frank spent as much time as he could out in these storms. He loved being in them. He loved the way he felt after the night with Caroline. The walking-on-air sensation returned, obviously a specific body awareness in response to certain emotional states, giving birth to the cliché. Lightness of being.

  Then also the intense winter was like moving into ever higher altitudes, or latitudes. He was in the wilderness and he was in love, and the combination was a kind of ecstatic state, a new realm of joy—

  “the joy which will not let me sit in my chair, which brings me bolt upright to my feet, and sends me striding around my room, like a tiger in his cage—and I cannot have composure and concentration enough even to set down in English words the thought which thrills me, what if I never write a book or a line?—for a moment, the eyes of my eyes were opened.”

  Emersonfortheday indeed. A man who knew how joy could loft you. No wonder they named schools after him! You could learn a lot just by reading him alone.

  He snowshoed the park regularly, but also began to range more broadly in the city, taking long walks on each side of the park. This was where the homeless guys were finding refuge, and where the fregans and ferals made their homes. Frank decided that whenever he did not know what to do, he was to go out and visit as many of the bros and the other homeless of Northwest as he could, and make sure their gear kit was up to the ferocity of the elements. Even if he found total strangers huddled on the Metro vents and in the other little heat sinks of the city, he talked to them too; and if they were at all responsive he got them under another layer of nylon, at the very least. Most had some down or wool on them, but a surprising number were still shivering under cotton, cardboard, plastic, foam rubber, newspaper. Frank could only shake his head. Don’t wear cotton! he would insist to perfect strangers. Some of them even recognized him as Johnny Appletent.

  He started visiting thrift stores and sporting goods stores too, buying overlooked or sale items, particularly synthetic clothes, and cheap but effective down bags. Once he bought a whole rack of capilene long underwear and matching long-sleeved shirts. These were really nice, similar to one of the inner layers he wore himself, and the next time he was out in the park and saw some of the bros were back in Sleepy Hollow, their shelters more knockabout than ever, he threw a top-bottom pair knotted together in to each one of them. “Here, wear this against your skin. Nothing but this stuff against your skin. No cotton! Throw all that cotton crap away. You’re going to freeze in that cotton shit.”

  “It’s fucking cold.”

  “Yeah it’s cold. Get this gear on and stay out of the wind when it blows.”

  “No shit.”

  Andy said, “It’s not the cold, it’s the wind.” The wee-und.

  “Yeah yeah yeah. That’s right.”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  Frank snorted. “That’s for sure.”

  It was the new truism, and already Frank was sick of it. Just as in summer people said, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” until you wanted to scream, in the winter they said, “It’s not the cold, it’s the wind.” So tedious to hear over and over! But Andy’s default mode was repetition of the obvious, so this new mantra was unavoidable.

  And certainly it was true. On windless nights Frank snowshoed through the forest completely removed from the cold; his exertion warmed him, and his heat was trapped in his layers of clothing, under jacket and windpants. The only problem was not to break a sweat. He might as well have been in a spacesuit.

  But in a wind everything changed. How big the world became, yes, but how cold too! His outer layer was as windproofed as you could get, but the wind still rattled through it and sucked at every move he made. On the very worst nights, if he wanted to walk into the wind he had to turn his back to it and crab backwards to keep his face from frostbite. During the days he had taken to wearing sunglasses with a nosepiece, because with his nose numb all the time he couldn’t be sure if it was getting frostbitten or not. More than once it had been white in the mirror when he got back in his van. The nosepiece helped with that, as well as giving him a medieval look, like a burgher out of Brueghel. Icicles of snot would hang from the tip of it at the end of a walk, but his nose would stay warm.

  Fine for his poor nose, but then he discovered there were other pro
trusions that also needed extra protection; he finished one long tramp on a windy Saturday afternoon, stopped in the forest to pee, and discovered to his dismay that his penis was as numb as his nose! Numb with cold, meaning, oh my . . . yes; it was thawing out in his hand, as painful a needling effect as he had ever felt, a burning agony lasting some ten minutes. He cried and his nose ran and it all froze on his face. An unusual demonstration of the density of nerve endings in that area, as in that old illustration of the human body in which the parts were sized in proportion to how many nerves they had, making a nightmare figure with giant mouth, hands, and genitalia.

  The lunch runners already knew all about this problem. Penile frostbite was a serious concern, and extra precautions simply had to be taken; at the least, a sock or glove jammed into one’s shorts, but also windproof nylon shorts, longer jackets, all that kind of thing.

  “What you need is a rabbit fur jock strap, the fur side in of course. You could make a fortune selling those.”

  So, Frank never again forgot to pay attention to this matter, and not just for himself. A couple weeks later, when he clattered into Sleepy Hollow:

  “Hey, Nosebleed.”

  “Hello gentlemen. How are your penises?”

  “Yarrrr!” Cackles, laughter: “Now the truth comes out! Now we know what he’s here for!”

  “You wish. Are you managing to stay unfrostbitten?”

  “NO.”

  Various grumbles and moans.

  “Look, there’s a shelter open over by UDC, it’s the closed high school’s gym and some classrooms too, it’s pretty nice.”

  “We know. Fuck you.”

  “Mr. Nose. Mr. Nosey Noser.”

  “Mr. Nosey Nose That Knows It All.”

  “Yeah well it beats freezing to death.”

  “Yarrr, fuck off. We have our ways.”

  “It is our fate to stay out here, but we will survive.”

  “I hope so.”

  Friday came and he went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant on Wisconsin near the Metro. He could tell already this would become his Friday night routine. It was an unpretentious little place where Frank could sit at the bar reading his laptop. Go to Emersonfortheday.com, search “fate”: