Sixty Days and Counting

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  To love accurately. The Dalai Lama says something about mindful consumption. We eat the world the way we breathe it. Thanks must be given, devotion must be given. One must pay attention, to do what is right for life.

  These were all the things a sociobiologist would recommend, if he could talk about what ought to be as well as what is. Buddhism as the Dalai Lama’s science; science as the scientist’s Buddhism. Again, as when Rudra Cakrin gave his lecture at NSF, it all becomes clear.

  Time passes in a flow of ideas. A couple of hours, in fact; no concessions to any suppposedly short attention spans. And the crowd is still silent and attentive. The time has gone fast somehow, and now the Dalai Lama is winding things up by answering a few questions submitted by e-mail, read by his translator from a printout.

  “Last question, Rebecca Sampson, fifth grade: Why does China want Tibet so bad?”

  Nervous titter from the crowd.

  The Dalai Lama tilts his head to the side. “Tibet is very beautiful,” he says, in a way that makes everyone laugh. A certain tension dissipates. “Tibet has a lot of forests. Animals, minerals—not so many vegetables.” Another surprised laugh, rustling unamplifed through the arena like wind in the trees.

  “Most of all, Tibet has room. China is a big country, but it has a lot of people. Too many people for them to care for on their own land, over the long term. And Tibet is at the roof of Asia. When you are in Tibet, no one can attack you from above! So, there are these strategic reasons. But most of them, when examined, are not very important. And I see signs that the Chinese are beginning to realize that. There are ways of accommodating everybody’s desires, and so I see some progress on this matter. They are willing to talk now. It will all come in time.”

  Soon after that they are done. Everyone is standing and clapping. A moment of union. Thirteen thousand human beings, all thankful at once.

  Say good-bye to the Quiblers. Wander with the crowd, disoriented, uncaring; it doesn’t matter where you leave the building. Just get outside and figure out then where you are.

  Outside. Westward on H Street. Quickly separate from the crowd that has witnessed together such an event: back among the strangers of the city. No more union. Over to G Street and west, past the White House with its fence, past the ugly Old Executive Offices, don’t turn in there to work. Just look. Think about the place from the outside. From the Dalai Lama’s point of view. Why had the Dalai Lama given Drepung a scarf to bless and put around his own neck? He hadn’t done that with anyone else. Must ask Drepung. Some kind of power.

  What was it the Dalai Lama said about compassion?

  The words are gone, the feeling remains. Did he really use the word oxytocin, did he really say positron emission topography, laughing with the translator as he mangled the phrase? What just happened?

  One can always just walk away. The Dalai Lama had said that for sure. Things you don’t like, things you think are wrong, you can always just walk away. You will be happier. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. But compassion is not just a feeling. You have to act.

  H OMELESS NIGHTS IN THE CITY. Slip out the security gate at sunset and off the grid, into the interstices, following the older system of paths and alleys and rail beds that web the urban forest like animal trails. Join the ferals living outdoors, in the wind.

  Frank worked from dawn until sunset on weekdays. The rest of the time he wandered the streets and the parks and the cafes. He turned in his van to the Honda place in Arlington, then paid cash to one of the fregans for a VW van with a burnt-out engine, and got Spencer to sign the papers to take ownership of it. He slept in it while he and Spencer and Robin and Robert worked at replacing its engine. It turned out Robin and Robert had VW experience, and they did not mind sitting around in a driveway after a run, fingering over a pile of parts. Apparently this was a recognized form of post-frisbee entertainment.

  “The VW engine is the last piece of technology humans could actually understand. You look under the hood of a new car, it’s like whoah.”

  “I lived in one of these for three years.”

  “I lost my virginity in one of these.”

  General laughter. Spencer sang, “I would fight for hippie chicks, I would die for hippie chicks!”

  “See if you can get the fan belt slipped over that there now.”

  The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.

  If that was true, then all should be well. He should be very high indeed.

  Decision was a feeling. In the morning he woke up in the back of the VW van, and saw his Acheulian hand axe up there on the dashboard, and his whole life and identity leaped to him, as solid as that chunk of quartzite. Awake at dawn: now was the time to eat a little breakfast bar, read a little Emerson. So he did. No pressure there, impeding his progress through time; he flowed with perfect equanimity. “To hazard the contradiction—freedom is necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting.”

  And so it did. With a sure hand he opened the door on the day.

  He got rid of his cell phone. He stopped using credit cards or checks; he got cash from the ATM in the office and he did all his e-mail there. He kept his FOG phone, but did not use it. He left the system of signs.

  Most of his waking hours he was working at the Old Executive Offices. While the VW van was still stationary, when he had an hour, he took the Metro out to Ballston to see Drepung and some of the other Khembalis at their office in the NSF building. Sometimes he walked from there out to the embassy house in Arlington. Once he looked in the garden shed.

  When they got the VW van running (it sounded like Laurel and Hardy’s black truck) he also added visits to the farm, to see the gang, and help out in the big garden there. He never stayed long.

  At the office he started working with a team from the OMB on funding proposals. They had done some macrocalculations for strategic planning purposes, and it turned out they could swap out the electricity-generating infrastructure for about three hundred billion dollars—an astonishing bargain, as one OMB guy put it. Stabilizing sea level might cost more, because the amount of water involved was simply staggering. Sustainable ag, on the other hand, was only expensive in terms of labor. If it wasn’t going to be fossil fueled, it was going to be much more labor intensive. They needed more farmers, they needed intensive management grass-range ranchers. In other words they needed more cowboys, incredible though that seemed. It was suggestive, when one thought of the federal lands in the American West, and public employment possibilities. The emptying high plains—you could repopulate a region where too few people meant the end of town after town. Landscape restoration—habitat—buffalo biome—wolves and bears. Grizzly bears. Cost, about fifty billion dollars. These are such bargains! the OMB guy kept exclaiming. It doesn’t take that much to prime the pump! Who knew?

  A little before sunset, unless something was absolutely pressing, Frank would leave the Old Executive Offices and the security compound, and take off into the streets. Check for tails, sprint at a few strategic moments down little cross streets, to test those behind; no one could follow him without him seeing it. Sometimes he then took the Metro up to the Zoo; sometimes he walked all the way. It was only two miles, about thirty minutes’ hiking. When traffic was bad the drive wouldn’t be that much faster. The city felt larger than it was because when in cars there were so many delays and turns and buildings; and when walking, the distances took a bit too long. At a running pace you saw how compact it was.

  Run off the map and into the forest. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in s
now puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

  That was it exactly; to the brink of fear. It filled you up. The wind in your face. These Concord guys! That America’s first great thinkers had been raving nature mystics was not accident, but inevitable. The land had spoken through them. They had lived outdoors in the great stony forest of New England, with its Himalayan weather. The blue of the sky, the abyss of fear behind things. A day out on the river, skinny-dipping with Ellery Channing.

  One evening as he hiked past Site 21 he saw that the old gang was back, looking as if they had never been away.

  “Zeno, Fedpage, Andy, Cutter!”

  “Hey there! Doctor Blood! Where you been?”

  “How are you guys, where you been?”

  “We haven’t been anywhere,” Zeno declared.

  “What!” Frank cried. “You haven’t been here!”

  Cutter waved a hand at two of his city park friends, sitting at the table with him. “Out and about, you know.”

  Andy yelled, “What do you mean where you been? Where you been?”

  “I’ve been staying with some friends,” Frank said.

  “Yeah well—us too,” Zeno growled.

  “Any sight of Chessman?”

  “No.” And stupid of you to ask.

  “Are you still doing stuff with FOG?”

  “With FOG! Are you kidding?”

  They told him about it all together, Zeno prevailing in the end: “—and Fedpage is still pissed off at them!”

  “He sure has bad luck with that federal government.”

  “You mean they have bad luck with him! He’s a Jonah!”

  “I am not a Jonah! I’m just the only one who looks up my rights in the personnel policies and then sticks up for them.”

  “You need to be more ignorant,” Zeno instructed.

  “I do! I’ve got to stop reading all this shit, but I can’t.” Fedpage was reading the Post as he said this, so the others laughed at him.

  Actually, it transpired, he was still doing some work with FOG, despite his beef with them, helping Nancy to organize chipping expeditions to tag more animals. To no one’s surprise, the bros had liked being given little dart guns, which shot chipped darts the size of BBs; and they liked their big hunts, when they went out in beater lines to shoot all the remaining unchipped animals they could find.

  “The problem,” Zeno told Frank, “is that half these animals are already chipped, and we aren’t supposed to plunk them twice, but it’s so tempting once you’ve got one in your sights.”

  “So you shoot anyway?”

  “No, we start shooting each other!” Triumphant laughter at this. “It’s like those paintball wars. Andy must have ten chips in him by now.”

  “That’s only ’cause he shot so many people first!”

  “Now there are surveillance screens in this city where he is like twelve people in one spot.”

  “He’s a jury!”

  “So don’t you be trying to send us on no more secret spy missions,” Andy told Frank. “We’re all lit up like Christmas trees.”

  “Protective coloration,” Frank suggested. “I should pass through you guys every night.”

  “Don’t do that,” Zeno warned. “We take this opportunity to say no to Dr. No.”

  “Yeah well, sorry about that guys, I meant to thank you and I know it was a long time ago now, but whenever I came out here you guys weren’t here, so I didn’t know.”

  “We’ve been around,” Zeno said.

  A silence stretched, and Frank sat on his old bench. “Why are you pissed off at FOG?” he asked Fedpage. “How exactly did you get bogarted by the evil Big Brother that is Friends of the National Zoo?”

  “The Department of Parkland Security, you mean? Look, all I was saying was that we were doing regular national-park work on a volunteer basis, and that made us subject to federal liability, which means we have to sign their stipulated waivers or else the NPS would be left liable for any accidents, whereas with the waivers it would fall on Interior’s general personnel funds, which is where you would want it if you wanted any timely compensation! But what do I know?”

  Zeno said, “So get on that, Blood. We want that fixed.”

  “Okay. Well hey guys, I was just passing through on my way to meet the frisbees, I’m going to go join them. But it’s good to see you. I’ll drop on by again. I’m doing some sunset counts for FOG, and dawn patrols too, so I’ll be around. Are folks hanging here much now?”

  No replies, as usual. The bros never much on discussing plans.

  “Well, I’ll see you if I see you,” Frank said.

  “I’ll join you for a FOG walk,” Fedpage said darkly. “You need to hear the whole story about them.”

  That day’s sunset was now gilding the autumn forest’s dull yellows and browns. Leaves covered the surrounding hillsides to ankle depth everywhere they could see. Cutter gestured at the view with the can of beer in his hand: “Ain’t it pretty? All these leaves, and nobody’s gonna have to leaf-blow them away.”

  Fedpage did join him on a dawn patrol one morning, massaging his face to wake up. The two of them wandered slowly up the ravine, peering through the trees, pinging animals they saw with their FOG RFID readers. Fedpage talked under his breath most of the time. Perhaps obsessive-compulsive, with huge systems in his mind which made better sense to him than he could convey to other people. He was not unlike Anna in this intense regard for systems, but did not have Anna’s ability to assign them their proper importance, to prioritize and see a path through a pattern, which was what made Anna so good at NSF. Without that component, or even radically lacking in it, Fedpage was living on the street and crying in his beer, always going on about lost battles over semihallucinated bureaucratic trivia. An excess of reason itself a form of madness, indeed.

  You needed it all working. Otherwise things got strange. Indecisiveness was a kind of vertigo in time, a loss of balance in one’s sense of movement into the future. When you weren’t actually in the state it was hard to remember how it had felt. “Forever wells up the impulse of choosing. ” So it might seem, when all was well.

  He and Fedpage came on an old man, comatose in his layby—blue-skinned, clearly in distress. The two of them kneeled over him, trying to determine if he was still alive, calling Nancy and 911 both, then wondering whether they should try to carry him out to Broad Branch Road, or instead wait where they were and be the ping for the rescue team. Fedpage babbled angrily about poor response time averages while Frank sat there wishing he knew more about medical matters, resolving (yet again) to at least take a CPR course.

  He said this to Fedpage and Fedpage snorted. “Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.”

  Bill Murray, trying to help a stricken homeless guy. Yet another truth from that movie so full of them; if you really wanted to help other people you would have to devote years of your life to learning how.

  He tried to express this to Fedpage, just to pass the time congealing around them. Fedpage nodded as he listened to the stricken man’s stertorous breathing. “Maybe it’s just sleep apnea we got here. What a great fucking movie. Me and Zeno were arguing about how many years that day had to go on for Bill Murray. I said it couldn’t be less than ten years, because of the piano lessons and the med school and the, you know,” and he was off on a long list of all of the character’s accomplishments and how many hours it would take to learn these skills, and how much time he had had for them in any given version of the repeated day. “Also, when you think about it, if Bill Murray can do different things every day, and get a different response from the people around him, just how exactly is that different from any ordinary day? It ain’t any different, that’s what! Other people don’t remember what you did the day before, they don’t give a shit, they’ve got their own day to deal with! So in essence we’re all living our own Groundhog Day, right? Every day
is always just the same fucking day.”

  “You should be a Buddhist,” Frank said. “You should talk to my Buddhist friends.”

  “Yeah right. I don’t go in for that hippie shit.”

  “It’s not hippie shit.”

  “Yeah it is. How would you know.”

  “I talk to them is how I know. I lived with them.”

  “Oh. Well. That explains it then. But it also proves my point about them being hippies. I mean you don’t just live with people, do you.”

  All while the old man cradled between them gasped, or did not gasp. Eventually the rescue team arrived, and under a blistering critique from Fedpage they got the old guy out to their ambulance. There Fedpage tried to grill them on the paperwork the operation would require of all involved, but the meds waved him away and drove off.

  Talking to Fedpage was like talking to Rudra Cakrin. Frank knew some strange people. Some of these people had problems.

  None more so, for instance, than the blond woman from the park. Frank saw her again, one evening at Site 21 when some of them were there, and he said “Hi,” and sat down next to her to ask how she was doing.

  “Oh—day eighteen,” she said, with a wry look.

  Frank said, “Well. Eighteen’s better than none.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But, you know, after all this time, I still don’t think we’ve ever been introduced. I’m Frank Vanderwal.” He stuck out a hand, which she took and shook daintily, with her fingertips.

  “Deirdre. Nice to meetcha, ha ha.”

  “Yeah, the bros aren’t much on introductions. Hey Deirdre—any sign of Chessman?”

  “No, I ain’t seen him. I’m sure he’s moved.”

  And on from there. She was happy to talk. Lots happened when you were homeless. It was starting to get cold again. She was staying at the UDC shelter again. The whole gang had spent most of the summer there, or over at the feral camp in Klingle Park. Lots of people were going feral in Northwest—hundreds—it made it safer in some ways, more dangerous in others. It could be fun; it could be too fun.