Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  It seemed to Frank that they were restless. It wasn’t obvious; at first glance they appeared languid, because any time they were not moving they tended to melt into their positions, even if they were hanging from the fence. So they looked mellow—especially when sprawled on the ground, arm flung overhead, idly grooming partner or kid—a life of leisure!

  But after watching for a while it became evident that every ten minutes they were doing something else. Racing around the fence, eating, grooming, rocking; eventually it became apparent that they never did anything for more than a few minutes at a time.

  Now the younger son caught fire and raced around the top of the fence, then cast himself into space in a seemingly suicidal leap; but he crashed into the canvas loop that crossed the cage just above the tops of the ground shrubs, hitting it with both arms and thus breaking his fall sufficiently to avoid broken bones. Clearly it was a leap he had made hundreds of times before, after which it was his habit to run over and bushwhack his dad.

  Wrestling on the grass. Did Bert remember wrestling his elder son on that same spot? Did the younger son remember his brother? Their faces, even as they tussled, were thoughtful and grave. They seemed lost in their thoughts. They looked like animals who had seen a lot. This may have just been an accident of physiognomy. The look of the species.

  Some teenagers came by and hooted inexpertly, hoping to set the animals off. “They only do that at dawn,” Nick reminded Frank; despite that, they joined the youths’ effort. The gibbons did not. The teenagers looked a bit surprised at Frank’s expertise. Oooooooooooop! Oop oop ooooop!

  Now Bert and May rested on their porch in the sun. Bert sat looking at the empty food basket, one long-fingered thumbless hand idly grooming May’s stomach. She lay flat on her back, looking bored. From time to time she batted Bert’s hand. It looked like the stereotypical dynamic, male groping female who can’t be bothered. But when May got up she suddenly bent and shoved her butt at Bert’s face. He looked for a second, leaned in and licked her; pulled back; smacked his lips like a wine taster. No doubt he could tell exactly where she was in her cycle.

  The humans above watched without comment. After a while Nick suggested checking out their tigers, and Frank agreed.

  Walking down the path to the big cat island, the image of May grooming Bert stuck in Frank’s mind. White-cheeked gibbons were monogamous. Several primate species were, though far more were not. Bert and May had been a couple for over twenty years, more than half their lives; Bert was thirty-six, May thirty-two. They knew each other.

  When a human couple first met, they presented a facade of themselves to the other, a performance of the part of themselves they thought made the best impression. If both fell in love, they entered into a space of mutual regard, affection, lust; they fell in love; it swept them off their feet, yes, so that they walked on air, yes.

  But if the couple then moved in together, they quickly saw more than just the performance that up to that point was all they knew. At this point they either both stayed in love, or one did while one didn’t, or they both fell out of love. Because reciprocity was so integral to the feeling, mostly one could say that they either stayed in love or they fell out of it. In fact, Frank wondered, could it even be called love if it were one-sided, or was that just some kind of need, or a fear of being alone, so that the one “still in love” had actually fallen out of love also, into denial of one sort or another. Frank had done that himself. No, true love was a reciprocal thing; one-way love, if it existed at all, was some other emotion, like saintliness or generosity or devotion or goodness or pity or ostentation or virtue or need or fear. Reciprocal love was different from those. So when you fell in love with someone else’s presentation, it was a huge risk, because it was a matter of chance whether on getting to know one another you both would stay in love with the more various characters who now emerged from behind the mask.

  Bert and May didn’t have that problem.

  The swimming tigers were flaked out in their enclosure, lying like any other cats in the sun. Tigers were not monogamous. They were in effect solitaries, who went their own way and crossed paths only to mate. Moms kicked out their cubs after a couple of years, and all went off on their own.

  These two, however, had been thrown together, as if by fate. Swept out to sea in the same flood, rescued by the same ship, kept in the same enclosures. Now the male rested his big head on the female’s back. He licked her fur from time to time, then plopped his chin on her spine again.

  Maybe there was a different way of coming to love. Spend a lot of time with a fellow traveler; get to know them across a large range of behaviors; then have that knowledge ripen into love.

  The swimming tigers looked content. At peace. No primate ever looked that peaceful. Nick and Frank went to get snow cones. Frank always got lime; Nick got a mix of root beer, cherry, and banana.

  THE KHEMBALI HOUSE STAYED VERY BUSY. With a significant percentage of Khembalung’s population cycling through it, occupying every closet and stairwell while waiting for openings in other refugia being established, the place jumped with a sense of crammed life that to Frank often felt surreal. Sometimes it was so obvious that a whole town had moved into a single house, as in some reality TV show. Sometimes as he sat in the corner of the big kitchen, peeling potatoes or drying dishes, he would look at all the industrious faces, cheerful or harried as they might be, and think: This is almost entertaining. Other times the tumult would get to him and his train of thought would leave the room and return to the forest in his mind. It was dark in that particular parcellation, dark and quiet, no, not quiet—the sound of the wind in the trees was always there—but solitary. The leaves and the stars and the creek were peaceful company.

  “People are so crazy,” he would say to Rudra Cakrin at the end of the night as he sprawled on his mattress.

  “Ha ha.”

  Some nights he stayed late at work, working on the list or talking on the phone to a contact Diane had in Moscow, a Dmitri, who worked in the Kremlin’s environmental resources ministry. Late at night in D.C. it was midday in Moscow, and Frank could call and try to find out more about the Russians’ carbon capture plans. Dmitri’s English was excellent. He claimed that no decisions had been made about interventions of any kind. They were very happy to see the North Atlantic project under way.

  After these conversations Frank sometimes just slept there on his couch, as he had planned to back at the beginning. It was entirely comfortable, but Frank found he missed his conversations with Rudra Cakrin. There was no other part of the day that held as many surprises for him. Even talking to Diane or Dmitri wasn’t as surprising, and the two Ds were getting pretty surprising. Sometimes Frank found himself a little bit jealous; she and Dmitri were old friends, and Frank could hear Diane’s voice take on the quality it had when she was talking to someone close to her; also the tone of one great power speaking to another. Dmitri had carte blanche to experiment with one-sixth of the land surface of the Earth. That was power; there were bound to be surprises there.

  Even so, Rudra was more surprising. One night Frank was lying on his groundpad in the light of the dimmed laptop, trying to tell Rudra about the impact the old man’s lecture at NSF had had on him. When he asked about the particular sentence that had acted on him like a sort of catalyst—”An excess of reason is itself a form of madness”—Rudra snorted.

  “Milarepa say that because his guru beat him all the time, and always a good reason for it. So Milarepa never think much of reason. But that is an easy thing to notice. And hardly anyone ever reason anyway.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed that.” Frank described to the old man what had happened to him subsequent to the lecture containing that remark, explaining what he could of his ideas about zen koans or paradigm busters, and how they caused actual physical changes in the brain, leading to new systems of parcellation that reorganized both unconscious thought and the way consciousness perceived the world. “Then on the way to the Quiblers I got stuck w
ith a woman in an elevator, I’ll tell you about that some other time. . . .”

  “Dakini!” Rudra said, eyes gleaming.

  “Maybe,” Frank said, googling the word, some kind of female Tantric spirit, “anyway it convinced me that I had to stay in D.C., and yet I had put a resignation letter in Diane’s in-box that was kind of harsh. So I decided I had to get it out, and the only way to do it was to break into the building through the skylight and go into her office through the window.”

  “Good idea,” Rudra said. For the first time it occurred to Frank that when Rudra said this he might not always mean it. An ironic oracle: another surprise.

  Another time Rudra knocked his water glass over and said “Karmapa!” shortly.

  “Karmapa, what’s that, like three jewels?”

  “Yes. Name of founder of Karma Kagyu sect.”

  “So, like saying Christ or something.”

  “Yes.”

  “You Buddhists are pretty mellow with the curses, I guess that makes sense. It’s all like Heavens to Betsy!”

  Rudra grinned. “Gyakpa zo!”

  “What’s that one.”

  “Eat shit.”

  “Whoah, okay then! Pretty good.”

  “What about you, what you say?”

  “Oh, we say eat shit also, although it’s pretty harsh. Then, like ‘God damn you’ or whatever. . . .”

  “Means maker of universe? Condemn to hellworld?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

  “Pretty harsh!”

  “Yes,” laughing, “and that’s one of the mild ones.”

  Another night, shockingly warm, the house stuffy and murmurous, creaking under the weight of its load, Frank complained, “Couldn’t we move out to the garden shed or something?”

  “Garden shed?” Rudra said, holding up his hands to make a box.

  “Yes, the little building out back. Maybe we could move out there.”

  “I like that.”

  Frank was surprised again. “It would be cold.”

  “Cold,” Rudra said scornfully. “No cold.”

  “Well. Maybe not for you. Or else you haven’t been outside lately at night. It was as cold as I’ve ever felt it, back in February.”

  “Cold,” Rudra said, dismissing the idea. “Test for oracle, to see if Dorje truly visits him, one spends night naked by river with many wet sheets. Wear sheets through the night, see how many one can dry.”

  “Your body heat would dry out a wet sheet?”

  “Seven in one night.”

  “Okay, well, let’s ask about the shed then. Spring is here, and I need to move outdoors.”

  “Good idea.”

  Frank added that to his list of Things To Do, and when the house mother, a kind of sirdari in the Sherpa style, got time to look at the shed with him, she was quick to approve and make the arrangements. She wanted their closet to house two elderly nuns who had just arrived, the oldest one looking frail.

  The shed was dilapidated in the extreme. It stood in the back corner of the lot under a big tree, and the leaf fall had destroyed the shingles. Frank swept off some of the mulch and tarped over the roof, with a promise to it to make proper repairs in the summer. Inside its one room they moved two old single beds, a bridge table with a lamp, two chairs, and a space heater.

  Immediately Frank felt better.

  “Nice to lose things,” Rudra commented.

  Frank quoted the Emersonfortheday: “One is rich in proportion to the things one doesn’t need.”

  “We seem to be getting very rich.”

  The Khembalis’ vegetable garden lay outside their door in the backyard. It was obsessively tended, even in winter, and now that spring was here the black soil mounding up in long rows from the pale mulch was dotted everywhere by new greens. Immaculately espaliered branches of dwarf fruit trees were dotted with lime-green points and no longer looked dead. If there was any sun at all during the day the garden would be filled with elderly Khembalis sitting on the ground, weeding and gossiping. Frank joined Rudra and this group for a couple of hours on Sunday mornings, puttering about in the usual gardening way. Rudra spoke to the others in quick Tibetan, not trying to keep Frank in the conversation. Frank had his Tibetan primer, and was still trying to learn, but the language’s origins were not Indo-European, and it seemed to Frank a very alien system, hard to pronounce, and employing endings that sounded alike in the same way the letters of the alphabet looked alike. To compound his difficulties, Khembali was an eastern dialect of Tibetan, with some important differences in pronunciation that had never been written down. It made for slow going. Mostly they reverted to English.

  The lengthening days got fuller, impossible though that seemed. In the mornings Frank went to Optimodal, then to work; ran with the lunch runners when he could get away, then back to work; in the evenings over to the park for a frisbee run, passing the bros and catching a brief burst of their rambunctious assholery; then to a restaurant, often an impulse stop; and back to the house, to help where he could, usually the final cleanup in the kitchen. By the time he went out to the shed and Rudra, he was almost asleep.

  Rudra was usually sitting up in bed, back against the headboard. Some-times he seemed to be daydreaming, others observant, even if only looking at the candle. He seemed attentive to the quality of Frank’s silences. Some-times he watched Frank without actually listening to him. Frank found that unnerving—although sometimes, when he quit talking and sat on his bed, reading or tapping away at his laptop, he became aware of a feeling that seemed in the room rather than in himself, of peacefulness and calm. It emanated from the old man. Rudra would watch him, or space out, perhaps humming to himself, perhaps emit a few bass notes with their head tones buzzing in a harmonic fifth. Meditation, Rudra said once when asked about them. What might meditation be said to be doing? Could one disengage awareness, or rather the active train of consciousness, always spinning out its string of sentences? Leaving only awareness? Without falling asleep? And what then was the mind doing? Was the deep thinking in the unconscious actually continuing to cogitate in its own hidden way, or did it too calm? Memories, dreams, reflections? Was there someone in there below the radar, walking the halls of the parcellated mind and choosing which room to enter, going in and considering the contents of that parcellation, and its relation to all the rest?

  God he hoped so. It was either that or else he was zoning through his days in a haze of indecision. It could be that too.

  He was almost asleep one night when his cell phone beeped, and he roused to answer it, knowing it was her.

  “Frank it’s me.”

  “Hi.” His heart was pounding. The sound of her voice had the effect of cardiac paddles slapped to his chest. The sensation was actually kind of frightening.

  “Can you meet?”

  “Yeah sure.”

  “I know you’re in Arlington now. How about the Lincoln Memorial, in an hour?”

  “Sure.”

  “Not on the front steps. Around the back, between it and the river.”

  “Isn’t that still fenced off?”

  “South of that, then. South of the bridge then, on the new levee path.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay see you.”

  Rudra turned out to have been sitting up in the gloom. Now he was looking at Frank as if he’d understood every word, as why not; it had not been a complicated conversation.

  Frank said, “I’m going out.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be back later.”

  “Back later.” Then, as Frank was leaving: “Good luck!”

  The banks of the Potomac between the Watergate and the Tidal Basin had been rebuilt with a broad levee just in from the river, topped by a path running under a double row of cherry trees. The Corps of Engineers had displayed their usual bravura style, and the new cherry trees were enormous. Under them at night Frank felt dwarfed, and the entire scene took on a kind of pharaonic monumentalism, as if he had been transported to
some vast religious site on the banks of the Nile.

  He stopped to look over the water to Theodore Roosevelt Island, where during the great flood he had seen Caroline in a boat, motoring upstream. That vision stood like a watermark in his mind, overlaying all his memories of the inundated city. He had never remembered to ask her what she had been doing that afternoon. She had stood alone at the wheel, looking straight ahead. Sometimes life became so dreamlike, things felt heraldic or archetypal, etched since the beginning of time so that one could only perform actions that already existed. Ah God, these meetings with Caroline made him feel so strange, so alive and somehow more-than-alive. He would have to ask Rudra about the nature of that feeling, if he could find some way to convey it. See if there was a Buddhist mental realm it corresponded to.

  There in the trees below stood the Korean War Memorial. Caroline emerged from these trees, saw him on the levee and waved. She hurried up the next set of broad shallow steps, and there under the cherry trees they embraced. She hugged him hard. Her body felt tense, and out here in the open he felt apprehensive himself. “Let’s go back to my van,” he suggested. “It’s too open here.”

  “No,” she said, “your van chip is on active record now.”

  “So they know I’m here?”

  “It’s being recorded, is a better way to put it. There’s comprehensive coverage in D.C. now. So they know where you drive. But they don’t know I’m here.”