Frank had made reservations for the night at a motel in Encinitas, but for some reason he was nervous about that; and besides, he wanted to take Caroline up to Leucadia. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep until he did.
So he explained as they left the Belly-Up, and she nodded, and he drove north on the coast highway.
“So?” Frank said. “How are you liking it?”
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “And I like your friends. But, you know—I’m not sure what I would do out here.”
“Well—anything you want, right? I mean, you’re going to have to do something different anyway. You aren’t going to be going back into intelligence….”
But maybe she thought she was. Maybe that was it.
She didn’t say anything, so he dropped the matter, feeling more uncertain than ever.
He turned left off the coast highway in Leucadia, onto the street that led to Neptune.
He parked a little down from Leo’s house. As they walked up the street, gaps to their left again revealed the enormous expanse of the Pacific, vast and gray under the marine layer, which was patterned by moonlight. Like something out of a dream. He had her here at last. Breaking waves cracked and grumbled underfoot, and the usual faint haze of mist salted the air.
He stopped in the street in front of one of the cliffside houses. The cliff here had given way in the big storms, and even the streetside wall of this particular house was cracked. It appeared that one corner of its outer foundation overhung the new face of the cliff. There was a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign stuck in the Bermuda grass of a narrow front lawn.
Frank said, “I followed up on something Leo said, and checked the USGS study of this part of the coast, and he’s right—this is a little buttress here, a little bit of a point, see? We’re a touch higher, and the iceplant doesn’t grow as well on the cliff, and there was this erosion, but the point itself is strong. I think this will be the last erosion you see here for a while. And there are things you can do to shore things up. And, you know, if worse came to worst, we could tear down this house entirely and build nearer the street. Something small and neat.”
“Like in this tree?” Caroline said, gesturing at the big eucalyptus tilting over them.
Frank grinned. “Well, incorporating it maybe. We’d have to save it somehow.”
She smiled briefly, nodded. “My treehouse man.”
She walked out to the edge of the cliff, looked down curiously. Anywhere else on Earth this would be a major sea cliff; here it was a little lower than average for North County, at about seventy feet. Everywhere sea cliffs were eroding at one rate or another.
“There’s a staircase down to the beach, just past Leo and Roxanne’s,” Frank told her, pointing to the south. “There’s a bike lane on the coast highway that runs from here all the way down to UCSD. I think it’s about twelve miles. You could get a job down there on campus, or nearby, and we could bike down there to work. Take the coast cruiser when we need to. We could make it work.”
“Well good,” Caroline said, staring at him in the moonlight. “Because I’m pregnant.”
-
FRANK DREAMED THAT CHARLIE CAME to him at the end of a day’s work and said, “Phil wants to see Rock Creek,” and off they went in a parade of black Priuses. In the park it was as snowy as in the depths of the long winter, and they crunched on snowshoes through air like dry ice. At Site 21 the bros had a bonfire going, and Frank introduced the bundled-up Phil as an old friend and the bros did not notice him, they were focused on the bonfire and their talk—all except Fedpage, who looked up from the Post he was feeding to the fire. He studied Phil for a second and his eyebrows shot up. “Whoah!” he said, and knocked his glasses up his nose to have a better look. “What’s this, some kind of Prince Hal thing going on here?” He jerked his head to the side to redirect Zeno’s attention to the visitor. “Oh, hey,” Zeno said as he saw who it was. Frank was afraid he would go all blustery and false like he often did with Frank himself, but Phil slipped through all that and soon they were adding fuel to the fire, and talking about Vietnam, and Zeno was fine. Frank felt a glow of pleasure at that. But otherwise it was cold, unless you sat too close to the fire, and the hour grew late, and yet on the Viet vets reminisced; Frank shared a glance with the Secret Service man sitting beside him, a black man he had never seen (and on waking he would remember this man’s face so clearly, it was utterly distinct, a face he had never seen before—where did the faces like that come from, who were they?) and their shared glance told them that they both had realized that the president liked this kind of scene, that he was a bullshitter at heart, like Clinton, like—how far did it go back? Washington? And so they were going to be there all night, talking about Vietnam.
But then Spencer and Robin and Robert came roaring through and Frank leaped up to join their night golf. They were going long, they said. It was too beautiful not to. They were shooting new holes all the way down Rock Creek and past the Watergate, curving one shot into the Lincoln Memorial to smack Abe’s left knee, then across to the Korean vets, where one of the doomed statues had his hand out as if to make a catch; then on to the Tidal Basin, threading the cherry trees lining the west bank, so that it took finesse as well as brute distance to do well; and then out to the FDR Memorial, where the final hole was declared to be the gold forefinger of Roosevelt’s second statue. Frank threw his frisbee and realized as it curved away that its flight was so perfect that it would hit the finger right on the tip, and so he woke up.
-
THEY GOT BACK TO D.C. JUST IN TIME for the Saturday of another party at the Khembali farm. It was a day on which Frank had a zoo morning scheduled with Nick, so he showed up at the Quiblers’ house at around ten.
“How was San Diego?” they asked him. They knew that he was planning to move back there.
“It was good.” He smiled what Anna called his real smile. “I found out that my girlfriend is pregnant.”
“Pregnant?” Anna cried—
“Girlfriend?” Charlie exclaimed.
The two of them looked at each other and laughed at their nicely timed response, also their mutual ignorance.
Then Anna snapped her fingers and pointed at Frank. “It’s that woman you met in the elevator, I bet.”
“Well yes, that’s right.”
“Ha! I knew it! Well!” She gave him a hug. “I guess you’re glad now that you went to that brown bag talk at NSF!”
“And came to your party afterward. Yes, that was quite a day. You did a good thing to set that up.” Frank shook his head as he remembered it. “Everything changed on that day.”
Anna clapped her hands a little. “Frank that is good news, so when do we get to meet her?”
“She’s coming to the party this afternoon, so you’ll meet her out there. She couldn’t make it to the zoo, though, she had to do some stuff.”
“Okay, good then. Off we go.”
They walked up to the Bethesda Metro, trained down to the zoo. In through the front gates—an entry Frank and Nick rarely used—past the pandas, then down toward the tigers, Joe racing ahead in perpetual danger of catching a toe and launching himself into a horrible face-plant. “Joe, slow down!” Charlie cried uselessly as he took off in pursuit.
Frank walked between Nick and Anna, all three looking for the golden tamarind monkeys and other little ferals squirreling around freely in the trees. By the time they had dropped in to see which gibbons were out, and continued down to the tiger enclosure, Joe was up on Charlie’s shoulders, and dangerously canted over the moat.
Their swimming tigers were basking in the sun. The male was draped against the tree like a tiger rug, his mouth hanging open. The female lay en couchant, long and sleek, staring sphinxlike into emptiness.
For a long time no one moved. Other people drifted by, passed on to other things.
“I saw the jaguar,” Frank told them. “It was casual at the time, or, I don’t mean casual—I was totally scared and ran away as soon as I could—but I
didn’t fully get it, how great it was to see it, until a few days later.”
“Wow,” Nick said. “Did you get a GPS?”
“It was at the overlook.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
After a while longer they went to get snowcones, even though it was just before lunch. Frank got lime; Nick got a mix of root beer, cherry, and banana.
Then Frank took off to go pick up his girlfriend, and the Quiblers went back to the house before continuing out to the farm.
The Khembalis’ party was a big one, combining as it did several celebrations, not just the Shambhala arrival, but also the Buddhist plum-blossom festival, which now would always mark the auspicious day when the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government had agreed on his return to Tibet. The treaty had been signed there in Washington, at the White House, just the day before. And now also it was Frank’s going-away party as well, and even a sort of shower; and last but not least, Phil and Diane were going to drop by for a bit. Their presence added to the crowd, as well as making the party into a kind of wedding reception, because the first couple had made their actual nuptials a completely private affair some days before. Parts of the punditocracy were squawking that this fait accompli was an unholy alliance of science and politics, but Phil had only laughed at this and agreed, adding “What are you gonna do?”
So when they arrived, there was the usual stir. But as soon as they had accepted a toast from all they insisted that the party refocus on the Khembalis, and the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet, and to what that meant, which was the return to the Tibetan people of some kind of autonomy or, as Phil reminded them briefly, semi-autonomy. “No one person or institution or nation is more than semi-autonomous anyway,” Phil said in his remarks, “so it’s very good, a welcome development that truly dwarfs any personal cause for celebration we might have. Although the personal causes in this case are all quite glorious.”
To which everyone said, “Hear hear.”
Frank and Caroline wandered the compound together, running into people Frank knew and chatting with them over cups of champagne and unidentifiable hors-d’oeuvres. Padma led them through every room in the much-articulated treehouse, and Caroline laughed to see Frank’s face as he contemplated the new upper reaches of the system. He took her out on the old limb to show her where he and Rudra had lived, and then he was given a tour of the farm’s current crops, and the orchard of apple saplings, just recently planted, while Caroline was taken in hand by Qang to meet some of the other Khembali women.
When Frank rejoined her, she was still deep in conversation with Qang, who was answering her questions with a smile.
“Yes,” Qang was saying, “that is probably what they have always stood for. We call them demons, but of course one could also say that they are simply bad ideas.”
“So sometimes, when you do those ceremonies to drive out demons, you could say that in a sense you’re holding a ceremony to drive out bad ideas?”
“Yes, of course. That is just what an exorcism of demons is, to us.”
“I like that,” Caroline said, looking over at Frank. “It makes it kind of explicit, and yet—religious. And it—you say it works?”
“Yes, very often it does. Of course, sometimes you need to do it more than once. We had to exorcise Frank’s friend Charlie twice, for instance, to drive out some bad ideas that had taken root in him. But I believe it worked in the end.”
She turned to Frank to include him in the conversation.
“It sounds like something I could use,” Frank said.
“Oh, no. I think you have never been infected by any bad ideas!”
Qang’s merry look reminded him of Rudra, and he laughed. “I’m not so sure of that!”
Qang said, “You are only infected by good ideas, and you wrestle with them very capably. That’s what Padma says.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“It sounds right to me,” Caroline said, slipping an arm under Frank’s. “I, on the other hand, could use a thoroughgoing exorcism. In fact I’d like to order up a full-on reincarnation, or not exactly, but you know. A new life.”
“You can do that,” Qang said, smiling at her. “We all do that. And especially when you have a child.”
“I suppose so.”
Sucandra joined them. “So, Frank,” he said, “now you go back to your old home.”
“Yes, that’s right. Although it will be different now.”
“Of course. The two of you together—very nice. And you will work for the institute you helped to start out there?”
“I’ll work with them, but my job will be back at the university. I’ve been on a leave of absence, so I have to go back.”
“But your research will connect to that of the institute?”
“Exactly. Some of my colleagues there are exploring some new possibilities. There’s an old student of mine who is doing remarkable things. First there was genomics, and now he’s starting what you could call proteomics. It looks like they’ll be starting up a small company of their own. In fact, I’ve been talking to Drepung about the idea of you guys investing in this company. If Khembalung has any kind of investment portfolio, you might want to talk with them. Because if things pan out for them the way I think they might, there’ll be some very important medical treatments to come out of it.”
“Good, good,” Sucandra said, and Qang nodded too. “Qang here heads that committee.”
“Yes,” Qang said, “I will talk to them. If we can make investments that help health, it’s a good thing. But Sucandra is our doctor, so he will have to take a look too.”
Sucandra nodded. “What about you, will you be investing in this new company?”
Frank laughed. “I might if I had anything to invest. Right now all I have is my salary. Which is fine. But we’re buying a house, so there won’t be much extra. But that’s okay. If it works there’ll be enough for everybody.”
“A nice thought.”
Then Drepung joined them. He was wearing his Wizards basketball shirt and his enormous Reeboks, and the cord to his iPod was entangled in his turquoise and coral necklaces.
“What about you, Drepung?” Frank asked. “Will you be moving back to Tibet?”
“Oh no, I don’t think so!” Drepung grinned. “Only room for one lama in Lhasa! Besides, I like it here. And I am obliged to stay in any case. It’s part of the deal with the Chinese, more or less. And besides, this is Khembalung now! And not just the farm, but really the whole D.C. area. So I have work to do here as an ambassador.”
“Good,” Frank said. “They can use you.”
“Thank you, I will give it a good try. What about you, Frank? Won’t you miss this place when you go back to San Diego?”
“Yes, I will. But I need to get back. And people always visit D.C. All kinds of reasons bring you back.”
“So true.”
“Maybe I’ll see you out there too.”
“I hope so. I’ll try to visit.”
Neither man was under any illusion as to how frequently this was likely to happen.
Frank looked around at the crowd. He knew a lot of the people there. If he had stuck to his plan and stayed just a year, and lived that year like a ghost, he would have passed through and gone home without regrets. No one would even have been aware of his passing. But it had not happened that way. It all came down to the people you ran into.
This was accentuated when the Quiblers arrived. Charlie pretended to be cheery about Frank’s departure, but he also shook his head painfully—“I don’t know who’ll get us out on the river now.”
Anna was simply sad. “We’ll miss you,” she said, and gave him a hug. “The boys will miss you.”
Nick was noncommittal. He looked off to the side. He spoke of the latest developments in their feral research program, steadfastly focused on the details of a new spreadsheet Anna had helped him set up, on which he could record all their sightings by species, and not only
keep an inventory, but enter range parameters, to gauge which species might be able to go truly feral. There was also a GIS program that let you identify or design habitat corridors. It was very interesting.
Frank nodded and made some suggestions. “We’ll keep in touch by e-mail,” he said at one point when he saw Nick looking away. “Then hey—maybe when you go off to college, you can come to UCSD. It’s a really fun school.”
“Oh yeah,” Nick said, brightening. “Good idea.”
Anna was startled at this suggestion, and Charlie actually winced. Neither were used to the idea of Nick growing up. But there he stood, almost as tall as Anna, and four or five inches taller than when Frank had met him. He was changing by the day, almost by the hour.
The Quiblers wandered the party. Nick and Anna talked about the swimming tigers with Sucandra as they all stood under the treehouse, looking up to watch Charlie chase Joe around the various catwalks.
“It’s gotten so big.”
“Yes, people like to live up there. People like to work on it too.”
“It would be cool,” Nick said.
Sucandra nodded. “You all should consider moving out here with us,” he said to them. “We would be so happy to have you here with us. You are already Khembalis, as far as we are concerned. And I think you would like it. A community like this is a kind of extended family. And of course group living is very thrifty,” he added with a smile at Anna. “Energy consumption would be only a fraction of that used by an ordinary suburban house.”
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