Sixty Days and Counting

-

The formalized “shortage economics” Anna had found had been pioneered by one Janos Kornai, a Hungarian economist who had lived through the socialist era in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. His work focused on the period 1945 to 1989, when most of his data had been generated. Anna found certain parallels to their current situation interesting, particularly those having to do with the hoarding response.

One day when she was visiting with Frank and Edgardo after a task force meeting in the Old Executive Offices, she showed some of what she had found to them. Edgardo happily pored over the relevant pages of the book she had brought along, chuckling at the graphs and charts. “Wait, I want to Xerox this page.” He was the happiest broadcaster of bad news imaginable, and indeed had recently confessed that he was the one who had started the tradition of taping especially bad news to the walls of the copy room called the Department of Unfortunate Statistics over at NSF—a revelation that was no surprise to his two friends.

“See?” Anna said, pointing to the top of the diagram he was looking at now. “It’s a decision tree, designed to map what a consumer does when faced with shortages.”

“A shopping algorithm,” Frank said with a short laugh.

“And have we made these choices?” Edgardo asked.

“You tell me. Shortages start because of excess demand—a disequilibrium which leads to a seller’s market, which creates what Kornai calls suction.”

“As in, this situation sucks,” Edgardo said.

“Yes. So the shelves empty, because people buy when they can. Then the queuing starts. It can be either a physical line in a store, or a waiting list. So for any given item for sale, there are three possibilities. It’s either available immediately, or available after a queue, or not available. That’s the first split in the tree. If it isn’t available at all, then the next choice comes. The shopper either makes a forced substitution, like apples for artichokes, or else searches harder for the original item, or else postpones the purchase until the item is available, which Kornai also calls ‘forced saving’—or else abandons the purchasing intent entirely.”

“I like this term ‘investment tension,’” Edgardo said, reading ahead on the page. “When there aren’t enough machines to make what people want. But that’s surely not what we have now.”

“Are you sure?” Frank said, paging through the paper. “What if there’s a shortage of energy?”

“It should work the same,” Anna said. “So see, in a ‘shortage economy’ you get shortages that are general, frequent, intensive, or chronic. The classical socialist systems had all these. Although Kornai points out that in capitalism you have chronic shortages in health care and urban housing. And now we have intensive shortages too, during the blackouts. No matter what the product or service is, you get consumers who have a ‘notional demand,’ which is what they would buy if they could, and then ‘completely adjusted demand,’ which is what they really intend to buy knowing all the constraints, using what he calls ‘expectation theory.’ Between those you have ‘partially adjusted demand,’ where the consumer is in ignorance of what’s possible, or in denial about the situation, and still not completely adjusted. So the move from notional demand to completely adjusted demand is marked by failure, frustration, dire rumors, forced choices, and so on down his list. Finally the adjustment is complete, and the buyer has abandoned certain intentions, and might even forget them if asked. Kornai compares that moment to workers in capitalism who stop looking for work, and so aren’t counted as unemployed.”

“I know some of those,” Frank said. He read aloud, “ ‘A curious state of equilibrium can arise,’” and laughed. “So you just give up on your desires! It’s almost Buddhist.”

“I don’t know.” Anna frowned. “ ‘Forced adjustment equilibrium’? That doesn’t sound to me like what the Khembalis are talking about.”

“No. Although they are making a forced adjustment,” Frank mused. “And they would probably agree we are forced to adjust to reality, if we want equilibrium.”

“Listen to this,” Edgardo said, and read: “ ‘The less certain the prospect of obtaining goods, the more intensively buyers have to hoard.’ Oh dear, oh my; here we are in a partially adjusted demand, not in equilibrium at all, and we don’t have what he calls monetary overhang, or even a gray or black market, to take care of some of our excess demand.”

“So, not much adjustment at all,” Frank noted.

“I’ve seen examples of all these behaviors already at the grocery store,” Anna said. “The frustrating thing is that we have adequate production but excessive demand, which is the hoarding instinct. People don’t trust that there will be enough.”

“Maybe thinking globally, they are right,” Edgardo pointed out.

“But see here,” Anna went on, “how he says that socialism is a seller’s market, while capitalism is a buyer’s market? What I’ve been wondering is, why shouldn’t capitalism want to be a seller’s market too? I mean, it seems like sellers would want it, and since sellers control most of the capital, wouldn’t capital want a seller’s market if it could get it? So that, if there were some real shortages, real at first, or just temporarily real, wouldn’t capitalists maybe seize on those, and try to keep the sense that shortages are out there waiting, maybe even create a few more, so that the whole system tips from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market, even when production was actually adequate if only people trusted it? Wouldn’t profits go up?”

“Prices would go up,” Edgardo said. “That’s inflation. Then again, inflation always hurts the big guys less than the little guys, because they have enough to do better at differential accumulation. And it’s differential accumulation that counts. As long as you’re doing better than the system at large, you’re fine.”

“Still,” Frank said. “The occasional false shortage, Anna is saying. Or just stimulating a fear. Creating bogeymen, pretending we’re at war, all that. To keep us anxious.”

“To keep us hoarding!” Anna insisted.

Edgardo laughed. “Sure! Like health care and housing!”

Frank said, “So we’ve got all the toys and none of the necessities.”

“That’s backwards, isn’t it,” Anna said.

“It’s insane,” Frank said.

Edgardo was grinning. “I told you, we’re stupid! We’re going to have a tough time getting out of this mess, we are so stupid!”

-

AGAIN FRANK FLEW OUT TO SAN DIEGO. Descending the escalator from the airport’s glassed-in pedestrian walkway, he marveled that everything was the same as always; the only sign of winter was a certain brazen quality to the light, so that the sea was a slate color, and the cliffs of Point Loma a glowing apricot. Gorgeous Mediterranean coast of the Pacific. His heart’s home.

He had not bothered to make hotel reservations. Rent a van and that was that—no way was Mr. Optimodal, Son of Alpine Man, going to pay hundreds of dollars a night for the dubious pleasure of being trapped indoors at sunset! The light at dusk over the Pacific was too precious and superb to miss in such a thoughtless way. And the Mediterranean climate meant every night was good for sleeping out, or at the very least, for leaving the windows of the van open to the sea breezes. The salt-and-eucalyptus air, the cool warmth, it was all otherworldly in its sensuous caress. His home planet.

During the day he dropped by his storage locker in Encinitas and got some stuff, and that night he parked the van on La Jolla Farms Road and walked out onto the bluff between Scripps and Black’s Canyons. This squarish plateau, owned by UCSD, was a complete coastal mesa left entirely empty—a very rare thing at this point. In fact it might have been the only undeveloped coastal mesa left between Mexico and Camp Pendleton. And its sea cliff was the tallest coastal cliff in all of southern California, some 350 feet high, towering directly over the water so that it seemed taller. A freak of both nature and history, in short, and one of Frank’s favorite places. He wasn’t the first to have felt that way; there were graves on it that had given carbon-14 dates around seven thousand years before present, the oldest archeological site in mainland southern California.

It occurred to him as he walked out to the edge of the cliff that on the night he had lost his apartment and first gone out into Rock Creek Park, he had been expecting something like this: instant urban wilderness, entirely empty, overlooking the world. To bang into the bros in the claustrophobic forest had come as quite a shock.

At the cliff’s edge itself there were small scallops in the sandstone that were like little hidden rooms. He had slept in them when a student, camping out for the fun of it. He recognized the scallop farthest south as his regular spot. It had been twenty-five years since the last time he had slept there. He wondered what that kid would think to see him here now.

He slept there again, fitfully, and in the gray wet dawn hiked up to the rented van and dropped off his sleeping bag and ground pad, then continued up to campus and the huge new gym called RIMAC. His faculty card got him entry into the spotless men’s rooms, where he showered and shaved, then walked down to Revelle College for a catch-up session at the department office. A good effort now would save him all kinds of punitive work when he finally made it back.

After that he bought an outdoor breakfast at the espresso stand overlooking the women’s softball diamond, and watched the team warm up as he ate. Oh my. How he loved American jock women. These classics of the type threw the ball around the horn like people who fully understood the simple joys of throwing something at something. The softballs were like intrusions from some more Euclidean universe, a little example of the technological sublime in which rocks like his hand axe had become Ideas of Order. When the gals whipped them around the pure white spheres did not illustrate gravity or the wind, as frisbees did, but rather a point drawing a line. Whack! Whack! God that shortstop had an arm. Frank supposed it was perverted to be sitting there regarding women’s softball practice as some kind of erotic dance, but oh well, he couldn’t help it; it was a very sexy thing.

After that he walked down La Jolla Shores Road to the Visualization Center at Scripps. This was a room located at the top of a wooden tower six stories tall, one room to each floor. Two or three of the bottom floors were occupied by a single computer, a superpowerful behemoth like something out of a 1950s movie; it was rather mind-boggling to consider the capacities of that much hardware now. They must have entered the kingdom of petaflops.

The top room was the visualizing center per se, consisting of a 3-D wraparound movie theater that literally covered three walls. Two young women in shorts, graduate students of the professor who had invited Frank to drop by, greeted him and tapped up their show, placing Frank in the central viewing spot and giving him 3-D glasses. When the room went dark, the screen disappeared and Frank found himself standing on the rumpled black floor of the Atlantic, just south of the sill that ran like a range of hills between Iceland and Scotland, and looking north, into the flow at the two-thousand-meter level. Small temperature differences were portrayed in false color that extended across the entire spectrum, all the colors transparent, so that the air appeared to have become flowing banners of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo. The main flow was about chest high on Frank. Like standing in a lava lamp, one of the techs suggested, although Frank had been thinking he was flying in a rainbow that had gone through a shredder. The pace of the flow was speeded up, the techs told him, but it was still a stately waving of flat bands of red and their penumbral oranges, ribboning south through the blues and blue-greens, undulating like a snake, and then rolling smoothly over a blue and purple layer and down, as if passing over a weir.

“That was five years ago,” one of the grad students said. “Watch now, this is last year this time—”

The flow got thinner, slower, thinner. A yellow sheet, roiling under a green blanket in a midnight-blue room. Then the yellow thinned to nothing. Green and blue pulsed gently back and forth, like kelp swinging in a moon swell, in a sea of deep purple.

“Wow,” Frank said. “The stall.”

“That’s right,” the woman at the computer said. “But now:”

The image lightened; tendrils of yellow appeared, then orange; then ribbons of red appeared, coalesced in a broad band. “It’s about ninety percent what they first measured at the sill.”

“Wow,” Frank said. “Everyone should see this. For one thing, it’s so spacy.”

“Well, we can make DVDs, but it’s never the same as, you know, what you have here. Standing right in the middle of it.”

“No. Definitely not.” For a time he stood and luxuriated in the wash of colors running past and through him. It looked kind of like a super-slo-mo screening of the hyperspace travel at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The underside of the Gulf Stream, flowing through his head. “Very pretty,” he finally said, rousing himself. “Say thanks to Mark for getting me down to see this.”

Then it was less than a mile’s walk back up the road (though he was the only person walking it), and he was north of the university, at the old Torrey Pines Generique facility, now the National Science Foundation’s Regional Research Center in Climate and Earth Sciences, RRCCES, which of course they were pronouncing “recess,” with appropriate comparisons to Google’s giant employee utopia in Mountain View—“They’ve got the playground, but we’ve got recess.”

Inside, the reception room was much the same. The labs themselves were still under construction. His first meeting was in one of these, with Yann Pierzinski.

Frank had always liked Yann, and that was easier than ever now that he knew Yann and Marta were just friends and not a couple. His earlier notion that they were a couple had not really made sense to him, not that any couple made sense, but his new understanding of Yann, as Marta’s housemate and some kind of gay genius, like Da Vinci or Wittgenstein, did make sense, maybe only because Yann was odd. Creative people were different—unless of course they weren’t. Yann was, and in a strangely attractive way; it was as if Frank, or anybody, could see the appeal Yann would have to his partner.

So, now they discussed the latest concerning the new institute, comparing it to the Max Planck Institutes that had been its model. It was an intriguing array of sciences and technologies being asked to collaborate here; the scientists ranged from the most theoretical of theorists to the most lab-bound of experimentalists. In this gathering, as one of the only first-rank mathematicians working on the algorithms of gene expression, and one with actual field experience in designing and releasing an engineered organism into the wild, Yann was going to be a central figure. The full application of modern biotechnology to climate mitigation; it got interesting to think about.

Yann’s specialty was Frank’s too, and to the extent Frank had been on Yann’s doctoral committee, and had employed him for a while, he knew what Yann was up to. But during the two years Frank had been away Yann had been hard at work, and he was now far off into new developments, to the point where he was certainly one of the field’s current leaders, and as such, getting pretty hard to understand. It took some explaining from him to bring Frank up to speed, and speed was the operative word here: Yann had a tendency to revert to a childhood speech defect called speed-talking, which emerged whenever he got excited or lost his sense of himself. So it was a very rapid and tumbling tutorial that Yann now gave him, and Frank struggled just to follow him, leaping out there on the horizon of his mind’s eye.

Great fun, in fact: a huge pleasure to be able to follow him at all, to immerse himself in this mode of thinking which used to be his normal medium. And extremely interesting too, in what it seemed might follow from it, in real-world applications. For there was a point at which the proteins Yann had been studying had their own kind of decision tree; in Yann’s algorithm it looked like a choice, like a protein’s free will, unless it was random. Frank pointed this out to Yann, wondering what Yann had been thinking when he wrote that part of the equation. “If you could force or influence the protein to always make the same choice,” he suggested, “or even simply predict it…” They might get the specific protein they ultimately wanted. They would have called for a particular protein to come out from the vasty deep of a particular gene, and it would have come when they called for it.

“Yes,” Yann agreed, “I guess maybe. I hadn’t thought about it that way.” This kind of obliviousness had always been characteristic of Yann. “But maybe so. You’d have to try some trials. Take the palindrome codons and repeat them maybe, see if they make the same choice in the operation if that’s the only codon you have there?”

Frank made a note of it. It sounded like some pretty good lab work would be needed. “You’ve got Leo Mulhouse back here, right?”

Yann brightened. “Yeah, we do.”

“Why don’t we go ask him what he thinks?”

So they went to see Leo, which was also a kind of flashback for Frank, in that it was so like the last time he had seen him. Same people, same building—had all that out in D.C. really happened? Were they only dreaming of a different world here, in which promising human health projects were properly funded?

But after a while he saw it wasn’t the same Leo. As with the lab, Leo looked outwardly the same, but had changed inside. He was less optimistic, more guarded. Less naive, Frank thought. Almost certainly he had gone through a very stressed job hunt, in a tight job market. That could change you all right. Mark you for life sometimes.

Now Leo looked at Yann’s protein diagrams, which illustrated his model for how the palindromic codons at the start of the KLD gene expressed, and nodded uncertainly. “So, basically you’re saying repeat the codons and see if that forces the expression?”

Frank intervened. “Also, maybe focus on this group here, because if it works like Yann thinks, then you should get palindromes of that too…”

“Yeah, that would be a nice result.” The prospect of such a clearly delineated experiment brought back an echo of Leo’s old enthusiasm. “That would be very clean,” he said. “If that would work—man. I mean, there would still be the insertion problem, but, you know, NIH is really interested in solving that one…”

Getting any of their engineered genes into living human bodies, where they could supersede damaged or defective DNA, had proven to be one of the serious stoppers to a really powerful gene therapy. Attaching the altered genes to viruses that infected the subject was still the best method they had, but it had so many downsides that in many cases it couldn’t be used. So literally scores or even hundreds of potential therapies, or call them outright cures, remained ideas only, because of this particular stumbling block. It vexed the entire field; it was, ultimately, the reason that venture capital had mostly gone away, in search of quicker and more certain returns. And if it wasn’t solved, it could mean that gene therapy would never be achieved at all.

To Frank’s surprise, it was Yann who now said, “There’s some cool new stuff about insertion at Johns Hopkins. They’ve been working on metallic nanorods. The rods are a couple hundred nanometers long, half nickel and half gold. You attach your altered DNA to the nickel side, and some transfer-rin protein to the gold, and when they touch cell walls they bind to receptors in pits, and get gooed into vesicles, and those migrate inside the cell. Then the DNA detaches and goes into the nucleus, and there it is. Your altered gene is delivered and expressing in there. Doing its function.”

“Really?” Leo said. He and his Torrey Pines Generique lab had been forced to look at a lot of options on this front, and none had worked. “What about the metals?”

“They just stay in the cell. They’re too small to matter. They’re trying out platinum and silver and other metals too, and they can do a three-metal nanorod that includes a molecule that helps get the thing out of the vesicles faster. They want a fourth one to attach a molecule that wants into the nucleus. And the nickel ones are magnetic, so they’ve tried using magnetic fields to direct the nanorods to particular areas of the body.”

“Wow. Now that would be cool.”

And on it went. Leo was clearly very interested. He seemed to be suggesting in his manner that insertion was the last remaining problem. If this were true, Frank thought…for a while he was lost in a consideration of the possibilities.

Leo followed Yann better than Frank had. Frank was used to thinking of Leo as a lab man, but then again, lab work was applying theory to experiments, so Leo was in his element. He wasn’t just a tech. Although he was obviously confident of his ability to work the lab as such, to design experiments expressly for his machinery and schedule. Sometimes he stopped and looked around at all the new machinery as if he were in the dream of a boy on Christmas—everything he ever wanted, enough to make him suspicious, afraid he might wake up any second. Cautious enthusiasm, if there could be such a thing. Frank felt a pang of envy: the tangible work that a scientist could do in a lab was a very different thing from the amorphous, not to say entirely illusory, work that was consuming him in D.C. Was he even doing science at all, compared to these guys? Had he not somehow fallen off the wagon? And once you fell off, the wagon rolled on; again and again as the minutes passed he could barely follow what they were saying!

Then Marta walked in the room and he couldn’t have followed them even if they had been reciting the periodic table or their ABCs. That was the effect she had on him.

And she knew it; and did all she could to press home the effect. “Oh hi, Frank,” she said with a microsecond pause discernible only to him, after which she merrily joined the other two, pushing the outside of the discussion envelope, where Frank was certain to be most uncomprehending.

Irritating, yes. But then again this was stuff he wanted to know. So he worked on focusing on what Yann was saying. It was Yann who would be leading the way, and emphasizing this truth with his attentiveness was the best way Frank had of sticking it back to Marta, anyway.

So they jostled each other like kids sticking elbows into ribs, as Yann invented the proteomic calculus right before their eyes, and Leo went deep into some of the possible experiments they might run to refine their manipulation of the biochemistry of cell wall permeability.

A very complicated and heady hour. RRCCES was off to a good start, Frank concluded at the end of this session, despite his sore ribs. Combine the efforts of this place with UCSD and the rest of the San Diego biotech complex, not to mention the rest of the world, and the syncretic result could be something quite extraordinary. Some newly powerful biotech, which they would then have to define and aim somehow.

Which was where the work at the White House would come in. There had to be some place where people actually discussed what to do with the advances science continually made. Somewhere there had to be a way to prioritize, a way that didn’t have to do with immediate profit possibilities for outside investors. If it took ten more years of unprofitable research to lift them into a realm of really robust health care, leading to long, healthy lives, shouldn’t there be some place in their huge economy to fund that?

Yes.

Which was why he did not have to feel superfluous, or on the wrong track, or that he was wasting his time, or fooling around. As Marta was implying with all her little digs.

But then she said, offhandedly, and almost as if trying to be rude, “We’re going to go out to dinner to celebrate the lab getting back together. Do you want to join us?”

Surprised, Frank said, “Yeah, sure.”

Ah God—those two words committed him to an awkward evening, nowhere near as serene as eating tacos on the edge of Black’s Cliffs would have been. Decisions—why be so fast with them? Why be so wrong? Now he would be pricked and elbowed by Marta’s every glance and word, all night long.

And yet nevertheless he was glad to be with them, slave as he was to Homo sapiens’ universal sociability. And also, to tell the truth, he was feeling under some kind of new dispensation with Marta: not that she had forgiven him, because she never would, but that she had at least become less angry.

As him with her.

Mixed feelings, mixed drinks; mixed signals. They ate in Del Mar, in one of the restaurants near the train station, on the beach. The restaurant’s patio and its main room were both flooded with sunset, the light both direct and reflective, bouncing off the ocean and the ceilings and the walls and the mirrors until the room was as hyperilluminated as a stage set, and everyone in it as vivid and distinct as a movie star. Air filled with the clangor of voices and cutlery, punctuating the low roar of the incoming surf—air thick with salt mist, the glorious tang of Frank’s home ground. Perhaps only Frank came from a place that allowed him to see just how gorgeous all this was.

Then again, now that he thought of it, Marta and Yann were just returning from a year in Atlanta, a year that could have been permanent. And they too looked a little heady with the scene.

And there was an extra charge in this restaurant, perhaps—some kind of poignant undercurrent to the celebrating, as if they were drinking champagne on a sinking liner. Because for this row of restaurants it was certainly the end time. This beach was going to go under, along with every other beach in the world. And what would happen to the beach cultures of the world when the beaches were gone? They too would go. A way of life, vanished.

Places like this first. Someone mentioned that high tides had waves running into the patio wall, a waist-high thing with a stairway cut through it to get to the beach. Frank nursed his margarita and listened to the others talk, and felt Marta’s elbow both metaphorically and sometimes literally in his ribs. He could feel her heat, and was aware of her kinetically, just as he had been years before when they had first started going out, meeting in situations just like this, drinks after work, and she the wild woman of the lab, expert at the bench or out in the waves. Passionate.

After dinner they went out for a walk on the beach. Del Mar’s was almost the only beach in North County left with enough sand for a walk; development meant all the southern California beaches had lost their sources of sand, but enough was left here to provide a fine white promenade for the sunset crowd. Surfers, shrieking kids in bathing suits, sandcastle engineers, runners, couples, and groups on parade. Frank had played all these parts in his time. All there together in the horizontal light.

They came to the mouth of the Del Mar River, and turned back. Marta walked beside Frank. Leo and Yann were chattering before them. They fell behind a little bit farther.

“Happy to be back?” Frank ventured.

“Oh God yes. You have no idea,” and all of a sudden she collared him and gave him a quick rough hug, intended to hurt. He knew her so well that he could interpret this gratitude precisely. He knew also that she had had a couple of margaritas and was feeling the effects. Although just to be back in San Diego was doubtless the biggest part of her mood, the boisterous high spirits he remembered so well. She had been a very physical person.

“I can guess,” Frank said.

“Of course,” she said, gesturing at the sea grumbling on and on to their right. “So—how are you doing out there, Frank? Why are you still there and not back here too?”

“Well…” How much to tell? His decision gears crunched to a halt with a palpable shudder. “I’m interested in the work. I moved over to the Presidential Science Advisor’s office.”

“I heard about that. What will you do there?”

“Oh, you know. Be an advisor to the advisor.”

“Diane Chang?”

“That’s right.”

“She seems to be doing some good stuff.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well, that’s good….” But still: “I bet you wish you could do that from here.” Gesturing again at the sea. “Won’t you have to come back to UCSD pretty soon?”

“Eventually, sure. But the department and the administration are happy to have someone out there, I think.”

“Sure, I can see that.”

She considered it as they walked along behind the other two. “But—but what about the rest of it? What about girls, Frank, have you got a girlfriend?”

Oh God. Stumped. No idea what to reveal or how. And he had only a second before she would know something was up—

“Ah ha!” she cried, and crashed her shoulder into him, like she used to—just like Francesca Taolini had in Boston, so familiar and intimate, but in this case real, in that Marta really did know him. “You do have one! Come on, tell me, tell me!”

“Well yes, kind of.”

“Kind of. Yes? And? Who is it?”

She had not the slightest idea that it might be Diane Chang, despite him having said he was following her from NSF to the White House. But of course—people didn’t think that way. And it was not something Frank had told anyone about, except maybe Rudra. It was not even really true.

But what then could he say? I have two sort-of girlfriends? My boss, whom I work for and who is older than I am and whom I have never kissed or said anything even slightly romantic to, but love very much, then also a spook who has disappeared, gone undercover, a jock gal who likes the outdoors (like you) and with whom I have had some cosmic outdoor sex (like we used to have), but who is now off-radar and incommunicado, I have no idea where? Whom I’m scared for and am desperate to see?

Oh, and along with that I’m also still freaked out by my instant attraction to an MIT star who thinks I am a professional cheater, and yes I still find you all too attractive, and remember all too well the passionate sex we used to have when we were together, and wish you weren’t so angry at me, and indeed can see and feel right now that you’re maybe finally giving up on that, and aren’t as angry as you were in Atlanta….

He too had had a couple of margaritas in the restaurant.

“Well? Come on, Frank! Tell me.”

“Well, it isn’t really anything quite like that.”

“Like what! What do you mean?”

“I’ve been busy.”

She laughed. “You mean you’re too busy to call them back afterward? That’s what too busy means to me.”

“Hey.”

She crowed her laugh and Yann and Leo looked over their shoulders to see what was going on. “It’s all right,” Marta called, “Frank is just telling me how he neglects his girlfriend!”

“Am not,” Frank explained to them. Yann and Leo saw this was not their conversation and turned back to their own.

“I bet you do though,” she went on, chortling. “You did me.”

“I did not.”

“You did too.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

Frank shrugged. Here they were again.

“You wouldn’t even go dancing with me.”

“But I don’t know how to dance,” he said. “And we still went anyway, all the time.” Except when you wanted to go by yourself to meet new guys and maybe disappear with them for the night.

“Yeah right. So come on, who is it? And why are you so busy anyway? What do you do besides work?”

“I run, I climb, I play frisbee golf, I go for walks—”

“Go for walks?”

“—snowshoeing, tracking animals—”

“Tracking animals?” Now she had gotten to the snorting phase of her laughter.

“Yes. We follow the animals that escaped from the National Zoo, and do feral rescue and the like. It’s interesting.”

She snorted again. She was thinking like the Californian she was: there were no such things as animals.

“I go ice-skating, I’m going to start kayaking again when the river thaws. I stay busy, believe me.”

“When the river thaws. But big deal, so what! You’re never too busy for company.”

“I guess.”

“So. Okay.”

She saw that he wasn’t going to say anything to her about it. She elbowed him again, and let it pass. She caught them up to the others.

The sun was almost down now, and the ocean had taken on the rich glassy sheen that it often did at that hour, the waves greenly translucent.

“Have you been out surfing yet?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure. What about you?”

“Not on this trip.”

They came back to their restaurant, went through to the parking lot, stood in a knot to say good-byes.

“Yann and I are going to go dancing,” Marta said to Frank. “Do you want to come along?”

“Too busy,” Frank said promptly, and grinned as she cried out and punched him on the arm.

“Oh come on, you’re out here visiting! You don’t have any work at all.”

“Okay,” he said. Dancing, after all, was on his paleolithic list of Things To Do. “What is it, some kind of rave again? Do I have to blast my mind with ecstasy to get with the beat?”

“Rave. That isn’t even a word anymore. It’s just a band at the Belly-Up.”

“A rave band,” Yann confirmed.

Frank nodded. “Of course.” That was Marta’s thing.

“Come on,” Marta said. “It only means you’ll know how to do it. No swing or tango. Just bop up and down and groove. You could use it, if you’re so busy out there.”

“Okay,” he said.

Leo had already driven off. He was outside Marta’s sphere of influence.

So he followed Yann and Marta up the Coast Highway to Solana Beach, and turned inland to the Belly-Up, a big old Quonset hut by the train tracks that had hosted concerts and dances and raves for many years now.

This night’s bill appeared to Frank to be catering to the gay and lesbian crowd, or maybe that was just what the Belly-Up audience always looked like these days. Although the band was a mostly butch all-girl acid reggae kind of thing, with perhaps a score of people on the little stage, and a few hundred bopping on the dance floor. So he could join Yann and Marta both on the dance floor, and start dancing (that curious moment when the rules of movement changed, when one began to dance) and then it was bop rave bop rave bop, in the heavy beat and the flashing lights, easy to lose one’s mind in, which was always good, dionysiac release into shamanic transcendence, except when it involved losing his sense of all that had gone on between him and Marta (Yann was somewhere nearby) and also his sense of just how dangerous it would be to regard her only as a sexy woman dancing with him, seemingly oblivious to him but always right there and deep in the rhythm, and occasionally giving him a light bang with hip or shoulder. (In the old days these bumps would have come from pubic bone as well.) He had always loved the way she moved. But they had a history together, he struggled to remember. A really bad history. And he was already overcommitted and overentangled in this realm, it would be crazy and worse to have anything more to do with Marta in that way. He had gotten her back to San Diego as a way to make up for taking their money out of their house without telling her, and that was that—they were even! No more entanglements needed or wanted!

Although he did want her. Damn those softball players anyway.

“Here eat this,” she shouted in his ear, and showed him a pill between her forefinger and thumb. Ecstasy, no doubt, as in the old days.

“No!”

“Yes!”

The paleolithics had gotten stupendously stoned, he recalled, in the midst of their dionysiac raves. Some of their petroglyphs made this perfectly clear, depicting people flying out of their own heads as birds and rockets. He remembered the feeling of peace and well-being this particular drug used to give him when he danced on it; and let her shove the pill in between his teeth. Nipped her fingers as she did. Leap before you look.

He danced with his back to her, and felt her butt bumping his as he looked at the other dancers. Quite a radical scene for good old San Diego, which Frank still thought of as a sun-and-sports monoculture, a vanilla Beach Boys throwback of a place, hopelessly out of it in cultural terms. Maybe one had to stay out in the water all the time for that to be true anymore. Although in fact the surf culture was also crazed. Certainly it was true that in the Belly-Up of the beast, in the cacophonous sweaty strobed space of the rave, there were plenty of alternative lifestyles being enacted right before his very eyes. Most provocatively in fact. Some very serious kissing and other acts, dance as simulated standing sex, heck actual standing sex if you were at all loose with the definition. A very bad context in which to keep only pure thoughts about his bouncing surfer-scientist ex, who always had been a party gal, and who was now looking like someone who did not remember very well the bad parts of their past together. That was not what dancing was about.

Maybe there was such a thing as being too forgiven.

Random thoughts began to bounce to their own rave in his head. Oh dear he was feeling the buzz. Could one get away with just one night of sex without consequences? Go out to Black’s Cliffs, for instance, and then later pretend it was just an aberration or had not happened at all? Marta had certainly done that before. It was pretty much a modus vivendi for her. But practical problems—she had rented a house with Yann again, Yann would know: bad. He didn’t have a hotel room to go to, and didn’t want Marta to know that—bad. So—no place to go, even though the cliffs would have been so nice, a trysting place of spectacular memory, in fact he had gone out there with two or three different women through those undergraduate years, among them some of the nicest of all the women he had ever met. It had been so nice, it would be so nice, it was all jostling in his head, Caroline, Diane, the dance, two young beauties nearby, groping each other in the crush of bouncing bodies, oh my, it was having an effect on him—an unusually vivid effect. Not since a well-remembered dance in a bar on the Colorado River during spring break of 1973 had he gotten an erection while on a dance floor dancing. It was not the effect ecstasy usually had on him. He really must be feeling it, Marta and her vibe, and her butt. And yes, that was her pubic bone too.

Maybe that was the cause of the erection. He turned to her again, and naturally now when she bumped against him she hit something else, and felt it, and grinned.

They had to shout in each other’s ears to be able to hear each other within the surround sound of the crunchingly loud bass line.

“I guess you liked the tab!”

“I don’t remember ecstasy doing this!”

She laughed. “They mix in Viagra now!” she shouted in his ear.

“Oh shit!”

“Yann’s friends make them, they’re great!”

“What the fuck, Marta!”

“Yeah well?”

“No way! You’re kidding me!”

Angry, even fearful, he stopped dancing and stared at her bopping in front of him. “I don’t like it! It’s making me feel sick!”

“You’ll get used to it!”

“No! No! I’m gonna go, I’ll see you later!”

“Okay go then!”

She looked surprised, but not horribly displeased. Amused at him. Maybe it really was just the new dance drug. Maybe it was revenge. Or an experiment. Or that for Marta there would still be a lot of potential partners there, for dancing or anything else, so it didn’t matter what he did. Who knew San Diego could be so depraved? People were totally making out right in front of his eyes. There were so many doing it they had a kind of privacy in numbers.

“See you then!” Marta said in his ear, and gave him a swift sweaty hug and a kiss, already looking around for Yann or whomever. Happy, he thought—maybe even happy at becoming free from her anger at him—or happy at her last little tweak of revenge. Happy to see him go! Maybe all the prurient thoughts about the two of them together had been his only and not hers. And the pill just the new dance pill.

He pondered this as he walked through the dark gravel parking lot to his rented van, cooled swiftly by his sweat and the salty night air, his erection like a rock in his pants. She didn’t care!

The erection was not a comfortable feeling, not a natural feeling, not a sexual feeling. Normally Frank was as happy as the next guy to have an erection, meaning very happy, but this was ridiculous. He was drugged by drugs, it had no connection to his feelings—he might as well be at the doctor’s, undergoing some horrible diagnostic! People were so stupid. Talk about technology replacing the natural pleasures, this really took the cake!

He cursed Marta viciously as he drove. Marine layer gusting in, lit by the city from underneath, then out over the sea darker, lit only by moonlight from above. Marta, angry at him: would he miss that when it was gone? A feeling was a relationship. Then again, now he was angry at her. There was something pressing on his brain, even more than the usual; a headache was coming on, the likes of which he had never felt before. A migraine, perhaps, and at the same time as a drug-induced hard-on that hurt. It was like priapism—maybe it was priapism! The side-effects warnings on the TV ads mentioned this ever so quickly, but it was a serious danger. Terrible permanent damage could result. Shit—he was going to have to go find an ER somewhere and confess all. Tell the truth that he hadn’t known he was taking it, and get laughed at as a liar.

He cursed again, drove up the long hill of Torrey Pines, past their new facility and UCSD. Park on La Jolla Farms Road and walk out onto the bluff in the dark, his stuff in a daypack.

He had spent some sexy nights out here, he thought as he throbbed. Oh well. Now he just wanted to be free of it. Just embrace the cliff and make love to Mother Earth. But it hurt and his head pounded and he was afraid. It felt as if an orgasm would blow out every little sac, or shoot his spine right out of him while his head exploded. Horror movie images—damn Marta anyway. What a horrible drug thus to ruin one of the best feelings of all. Some guys must be so desperate. But of course. Everyone desperate for love, so now you could buy it, of course, but it hurt. Would he have to give up and go to the ER and explain—have to feel the needles stuck in there to drain him?

Abruptly he got up and downclimbed over the lip of his little scallop, out onto the cliff. Now he was hanging there in space, and could slip and die at any moment. Not a good move really. Fear, real fear, stuck him like a stab in the ribs, and his blood rushed everywhere in him, hot and fast. Suddenly the sandstone was as if lit from within. His left foot was on a gritty hold, and slipping slightly. He grasped a shrub that had sent a branch over the lip, wondered if it would hold his weight. It was terrible climbing rock, gritty and weak, and suddenly he was angry as well as afraid. Sound of the surf cracking below—350 feet below. Hanging by a shrub on Black’s Cliffs. He set his feet and pulled smoothly back up onto the scallop, a desperately graceful little move.

And the blood had indeed evacuated his poor penis. Detumescence, a new pleasure, never before experienced as such. Blessed relief. Even his head felt a little better. And he had worked his will over a powerful drug, and over Marta too. Hopefully he had survived undamaged. Little sacs, all overfull; he was going to be sore, he could tell. It felt like last winter’s brush with penile frostbite.

Scared back to normality. Not a smart move. The margaritas might be implicated in that one. Leap before you look, sure—but not really.

He took a deep breath, feeling foolish in multiple ways. Well, no one knew the full extent of his folly. And he was back in his scallop. He could sit on his sleeping bag, breathe deeply, shake his head shuddering, like someone casting off a nightmare.

So much for Marta. She could not have cured him of his momentary lust for her any more effectively than if she had given him the exact antidote for it. Homeopathic poison; just her style. He recalled the last time he had taken mescaline, back in the days he had slept out here, throwing up and thinking it was stupid to poison oneself to get high. But that was what life with Marta had been. He liked her in some ways, he liked her energy and her wit, but there had always been so much he didn’t like about her. And any excess of her good qualities quickly became so obnoxious.

He wanted his Caroline. Somewhere out east she also was alone, and thinking of him. He knew it was true at least some of the time. How he wanted to talk to her! Cell phone to cell phone—surely they could both get one, on some account unknown to her ex? He needed to talk to her!

Like he could always talk to Diane.

Slowly the susurrus of surf calmed him, and then, as his body finally relaxed, it helped to make him sleepy. For a long time he just sat there. In D.C. it was three a.m. Diane and Caroline. His own personal D. C. He was jetlagged. San Diego—or really this campus, these very cliffs—this beautiful place…this was his home. The ocean made him happy. The ground here was good. Just to be here, to feel the air, to feel the thump of the breaking waves, to hear their perpetual grumble and hiss, grumble and hiss, crack grumble and hiss…To breathe it. Salt air fuzzy in the moonlight. The brilliant galaxy of light that was La Jolla, outlining its point. Ah, if only he knew what to do.

-

AT FIRST PHIL CHASE wanted to call his blog “The Fireside Chat,” but then someone pointed out to him that he was already doing those on talk radio, so he changed the name to “Cut to the Chase.” He wrote his entries late at night in bed before falling asleep, and hit send without even a spell check, so that his staff got some horrible jolts with their morning coffee, even though Phil had clearly stated right at the top of the home page that these were his private personal musings only, blogged to put the electorate in touch with his thinking as a citizen, and no reflection of formal policies of his administration. No impact whatsoever on anything at all—just the president’s blog.

-

BACK IN D.C. IT WAS STILL SO COLD that the idea that he could have been surfing the day before struck Frank as ludicrous. Crossing the continent in March was like changing planets. It was a bigger world than they thought.

It was so many planets at once. The Hyperniño had left California, following the Pacific’s oceanic heat shift to the west, which signaled the onset of a La Niña, predicted to be devastating to Southeast Asia. Now all of California was fully in the drought that had begun in the northern half of the state several years before. The East Coast, meanwhile, was in a kind of cold drought, which included occasional dumps of snow that had the consistency of styrofoam. Like the snow in Antarctica, Charlie’s colleague Wade said in a phone call. Frank called Wade fairly often now, finding him to be the best contact person on the Antarctic situation. Every once in a while, at the end of a call, they would talk for a minute or two about personal matters, which was interesting, as they had never met. But somehow something had come up, perhaps Wade describing his plans for a coming week, and after that they both seemed to like talking to someone they had never met about these kinds of things. Wade too had a girlfriend whom he saw all too infrequently. He described himself as a desert rat, who endured the polar cold for the chance to see this woman.

At the embassy, only the older Khembalis were used to cold. The younger ones were tropical creatures, and walked around blue-lipped; those of Rudra’s generation never seemed to notice the cold at all. They left their arms bare in really frigid temperatures.

Rudra often was reading in bed when Frank came in, or looking at picture books. Then one day Qang brought him a laptop, and he chuckled as he tapped away at it, looking at photo collections of various sorts, including pornographic. Other times Frank found him humming to himself, or asleep with a book still swaying on his chest.

When he was up and about, he was slower than ever. When Frank and he went for walks, they always got the wheelchair out from under the stairs; it was as if this was the way they had always done it.

Frank said, “Listen to this: ‘If he had the earth for his pasture and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still. He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy or demon who possesses such power as that.’”

Rudra said, “Emerson?”

“Right.” They had begun a game in which Rudra tried to guess which of the two New Englanders Frank was reading from. He did pretty well at it.

“Good man. Means, go for a walk?”

It was too much like a dog begging to get out. “Sure.”

And so out they would go, Rudra bundled in down jacket and blankets against the cold he claimed not to notice, Frank in a suitable selection from his cold-weather gear. They had a route now that took them north to the Potomac under a line of tall oaks flanking Irving and Fillmore Streets. This brought them to the river at the mouth of Windy Run, which was often free of ice, and thus a temporary water hole frequented by deer, foxes, beaver, and muskrats. They looked for these regulars, and any unusual visiting animals, and then the wind would force them to turn their backs and head downstream for a bit, on a rough old asphalt sidewalk, after which they could angle up 24th Street, and thus back to the house. The walk took about an hour, and sometimes they would stop by the river for another hour. Once as they turned to go Frank saw a flash of dark flank, and had the impression it might have been some kind of antelope. It would have been the first time in Virginia he had seen a feral exotic, and as such worthy of calling in to Nancy for entry into the GIS. But he wasn’t sure, so he let it go.

The quiet neighborhood between Rock Creek Park and Connecticut Avenue was looking more withdrawn than ever. It had always been empty-seeming compared to most of D.C., but now three or four houses had burned and not been rebuilt, and others were still boarded up from the time of the great flood. At night these dark houses gave the whole place an eerie cast.

Some of the dark houses gleamed at the cracks or smoked from the chimneys, and if after a dusk hike in the ravine Frank was hungry, or wanted company, he would call up Spencer and see if he was in any of these places. Once when Spencer answered they established that he was inside the very house Frank was looking at.

In Frank went, uncertain at first. But he was a familiar face now, so without further ado he helped to hold a big pot over the fire, ate broiled steak, and ended up banging on the bottom of an empty trash can while Spencer percussed his chair and sang. Robert and Robin showed up, ate, sang duets to Robert on guitar, then pressed Spencer and Frank to go out and play a round of night golf.

It was full moon that night, and once they got going, Frank saw that they didn’t need to see to play their course. They had played it so many times that they knew every possible shot, so that when they threw they could feel in their bodies where the frisbee was going to land, could run to that spot and nine times out of ten pick it up. Although on that night they did lose one of Robert’s, and spent a few minutes looking for it before Spencer cried, as he always did in this situation, “LO AND BEHOLD,” and they were off again.

Socks and shoes got wet with melted snow. No snowshoes tonight, and so he leaped through drifts and abandoned his feet to their soggy fate. On a climbing expedition it would have meant disaster. But in the city it was okay. There was even a certain pleasure in throwing caution to the wind and crashing through great piles of snow, snow which ranged from powder to concrete.

Then in one leap he hooked a foot and crashed down onto a deer’s layby, panicking the creature, who scrambled under him. Frank tried to leap away too, slipped and fell back on the doe; for a second he felt under him the warm quivering flank of the animal, like a woman trying to shrug off a fur coat. His shout of surprise seemed to catapult them both out of the hole in different directions, and the guys laughed at him. But as he ran on he could still feel in his body that sudden intimacy, the kinetic jolt: a sudden collision with a woman of another species!

Power outages were particularly hard on the few feral exotics still out in this second winter. The heated shelters in Rock Creek Park were still operating, and they all had generators for long blackouts, but the generators made noise, and belched out their noxious exhaust, and none of the animals liked them, even the humans. On the other hand, the deep cold of these early spring nights could kill, so many animals hunkered down in the shelters when the worst cold hit, but they were not happy. It would have been better simply to be enclosed, Frank sometimes felt; or rather it was much the same thing, as they were chained to the shelters by the cold. So many different animals together in one space—it was so beautiful and unnatural, it never failed to strike Frank.

Such gatherings gave the zoo’s zoologists a chance to do all kinds of things with the ferals, so the FOG volunteers who were cold-certified were welcomed to help. With Frank’s help, Nick was now the youngest cold-certified member of FOG, which seemed to please him in his quiet way. Certainly Frank was pleased—though he also tried to be there whenever Nick was out on FOG business in extreme cold, to make sure nothing went wrong. Hard cold was dangerous, as everyone had learned by now. The tabloids were rife with stories of people freezing in their cars at traffic lights, or on their front doorsteps trying to find the right key, or even in their own beds at night when an electric blanket failed. There were also regular Darwin Award winners out there, feeding the tabloids’ insatiable hunger for stupid disaster. Frank wondered if a time would come when people got enough disaster in their own lives that they would no longer feel a need to vampire onto others’ disasters. But it did not seem to have happened yet.

Frank and Nick got back into a pattern in which Frank dropped by on Saturday mornings and off they would go, sipping from the steaming travel cups of coffee and hot chocolate Anna had provided. They started at the shelter at Fort de Russey, slipping in from the north. On this morning they spotted, among the usual crowd of deer and beaver, a tapir that was on the zoo’s wanted list.

They called it in and waited uneasily for the zoo staff to arrive with the dart guns and nets and slings. They had a bad history together on this front, having lost a gibbon that fell to its death after Frank hit it with a trank dart. Neither mentioned this now, but they spoke little until the staffers arrived and one of them shot the tapir. At that the other animals bolted, and the humans approached. The big RFID chip was inserted under the tapir’s thick skin. The animal’s vital signs seemed good. Then they decided to take it in anyway. Too many tapirs had died. Nick and Frank helped hoist the animal onto a gurney big enough for all of them to get a hand on. They carried the unconscious beast through the snow like its pallbearers. From a distant ridge, the aurochs looked down on the procession.

After that, the two of them hiked down the streambed to the zoo itself. Rock Creek had frozen solid, and was slippery underfoot wherever it was flat. Often the ice was stacked in piles, or whipped into a frothy frozen meringue. The raw walls of the flood-ripped gorge were in a freeze-thaw cycle that left frozen spills of yellow mud splayed over the ribbon of creek ice.

Then it was up and into the zoo parking lot. The zoo itself was just waking up in the magnesium light of morning, steam frost rising from the nostrils of animals and the exhaust vents of heating systems; it looked like a hot springs in winter. There were more animals than people. Compared to Rock Creek it was crowded, however, and a good place to relax in the sun, and down another hot chocolate.

The tigers were just out, lying under one of their powerful space heaters. They wouldn’t leave it until the sun struck them, so it was better now to visit the snow leopards, who loved this sort of weather, and indeed were creatures who could go feral in this biome and climate. There were people in FOG advocating this release, along with that of some of the other winterized predator species, as a way of getting a handle on the city’s deer infestation. But others at the zoo objected on grounds of human (and pet) safety, and it didn’t look like it would happen anytime soon. The zoo got enough grief already for its support of the feral idea; advocating predators would make things crazy.

After lunch they would hitch a ride from a staffer back up to Frank’s van, or snowshoe back to it. If the day got over the freezing mark, the forest would become a dripping rainbow world, tiny spots of color prisming everywhere.

Then back to the Quiblers, where Nick would have homework, or tennis with Charlie. On some days Frank would stay for lunch. Then Charlie would see him off: “So—what are you going to do now?”

“Well, I don’t know. I could…”

Long pause as he thought it over.

“Not good enough, Frank. Let’s hear you choose.”

“Okay then! I’m going to help the Khembalis move stuff out to their farm!” Right off the top of his head. “So there.”

“That’s more like it. When are you going to see the doctor again?”

Glumly: “Monday.”

“That’s good. You need to find out what you’ve got going on there.”

“Yes.” Unenthusiastically.

“Let us know what you find out, and if there’s anything we can do to help out. If you have to like have your sinuses rotorootered, or your nose broken again to get it right or whatever.”

“I will.”

It still felt strange to Frank to have his health issues known to the Quiblers. But he had been trying to pursue a course of open exchange of (some) information with Anna, and apparently whatever she learned, Charlie would too, and even Nick to an extent. Frank hadn’t known it would be like that, but did not want to complain, or even to change. He was getting used to it. And it was good Charlie had asked, because otherwise he might not have been able to figure out what to do. The pressure was becoming like a kind of wall.

So: off to Khembali House, to fill his van with a load of stuff for the farm. Out there in the snowy countryside the construction of the new compound was coming along. Enough Khembalis had gotten licensed in the various trades that they could do almost all the work legally on their own. The whole operation ran like some big family or baseball team, everyone pitching in and getting things done, the labor therefore outside the money economy. It was impressive what could be done that way.

Frank still had his eye on the big knot of trees that stood on the high point of the farm. These were mostly chestnut oaks. They were like his treehouse tree but much bigger, forming a canopy together that covered most of an acre. It seemed to him that the interlaced heavy inner branches formed a perfect foundation or framework for a full Swiss Family extravaganza, and Padma and Sucandra liked the idea. So there was that to be considered and planned for too. Spring was about to spring, and there were materials and helpers on hand. No time like the present! Leap before you look!—but maybe peek first.

All the various scans that Frank’s doctors had ordered had been taken, at an increasing pace as they seemed to find things calling for some speed; and now it was time to meet with the brain guy.

This was an M.D. who did neurology, also brain and face surgery. So just in ordinary terms a very imposing figure, and in paleolithic terms, a shaman healer of the rarest kind, being one who actually accomplished cures. Awesome: scarier than any witch doctor. Whenever the technological sublime was obvious, the fear in it came to the fore.

The doctor’s office was ordinary enough, and him too. He was about Frank’s age, balding, scrubbed very clean, ultra-close-shaven, hands perfectly manicured. Used to the sight of the bros’ hands, and Rudra’s hands, Frank could scarcely believe how perfect this man’s hands were. Very important tools. They gave him a faintly wax-figurish look.

“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing at the chair across his desk from him.

When Frank was seated, he described what he had found in Frank’s data. “We’re seeing a chronic subdural hematoma,” he said, pointing to a light spot in an array of spots that roughly made the shape of a brain section—Frank’s brain. The CT scan and the MRI both showed evidence of this hematoma, the doctor went on, and pretty clearly it was a result of the trauma Frank had suffered. “Lots of blood vessels were broken. Most were outside the dura. That’s the sack that holds your brain.”

Frank nodded.

“But there are veins called bridging veins, between the dura and the surface of the brain. Some of them broke, and appear to be leaking blood.”

“But when I taste it?”

“That must be from encapsulated blood in scar tissue on the outside of the dura, here.” He pointed at the MRI. “Your immune system is trying to chip away at that over time, and sometimes when you swing your head hard, or raise your pulse, there might be leaking from that encapsulation into the sinus, and then down the back of your throat. That’s what you’re tasting. But the subdural hematoma is inside the dura, here. It may be putting a bit of pressure on your frontal cortex, on the right side. Have you been noticing any differences in what you think or feel?”

“Well, yes,” Frank said, thankful and fearful all at once. “That’s really what brought me in. I can’t make decisions.”

“Ah. That’s interesting. How bad is it?”

“It varies. Sometimes any decision seems really hard, even trivial ones. Occasionally they seem impossible. Other times it’s no big deal.”

“Any depression about that? Are you depressed?”

“No. I mean, I have a lot going on right now. But I often feel pretty great. But—confused. And concerned. Worried about being indecisive. And—afraid I’ll do something—I don’t know. Stupid, or—dangerous. Wrong, or dangerous. I don’t trust my judgment.” And I have reasons not to.

“Uh huh,” the doctor was writing all this down on Frank’s chart. Oh great. Confessing to his health insurance company. Not a good idea. Perhaps a bad decision right here and now, in this room. A sample of what he was capable of.

“Any changes in your sense of taste?”

“No. I can’t say I’ve noticed any.”

“And when you taste that blood taste, does it correlate with periods of decisiveness or indecisiveness?”

“I don’t know. That’s an interesting thought, though.”

“You should keep a symptom calendar. Dedicate a calendar to just that, put it by your bed and rate your day for decisiveness. From one to ten is the typical scale. Then also, mark any unusual tastes or other phenomena—dizziness, headaches, strange thoughts or moods, that kind of thing. Moods can be typified and scaled too.”

Frank was beginning to like this guy. Now he would become his own experiment, an experiment in consciousness. He would observe his own thoughts, in a quantified meditation. Rudra would get a kick out of that; Frank could hear his deep laugh already. “Good idea,” he said to the doctor, hearing the way Rudra would say it. “I’ll try that. Oh, I’ve forgotten to mention this—I still can’t feel anything right under my nose, and kind of behind it. It’s numb. It feels like a nerve must have been, I don’t know.”

“Oh yeah? Well—” Looking at the scans. “Maybe something off the nine nerve. The glossopharyngeal nerve is back there where we’re seeing the encapsulation.”

“Will I get the feeling back?”

“You either will or you won’t,” the doctor said. All of them had said that; it must be the standard line on nerve damage, like the line about the president having so much on his plate. People liked to say the same things.

“And the hematoma?”

“Well, it’s been a while since your injury, so it’s probably pretty stable. It’s hypodense. We could follow it with serial scans, and it’s possible it could resolve itself.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“We could drain it. It’s not a big operation, because of the location. I can go in through the nose. It looks like it would be straightforward,” checking out the images again. “Of course, there’s always some risk with neurosurgery. We’d have to go into that in detail, if you wanted to move forward with it.”

“Sure. But do you think I should?”

He shrugged. “It’s up to you. The cognitive problems you’re reporting are fairly common for pressure on that part of the brain. It seems that some components of decision making are located in those sulci. They have to do with the emotional components of risk assessment and the like.”

“I’ve read some of the literature,” Frank said.

“Oh yes? Well, then, you know what can happen. There are some pretty unusual cases. It can be debilitating, as you know. Some cases of very bad decision making, accompanied by little or no affect. But your hematoma is not so big. It would be pretty straightforward to drain it, and get rid of the encapsulated clot too.”

“And would I then experience changes in my thinking?”

“Yes, it’s possible. Usually that’s the point, so patients like it, or are relieved. Some get agitated by the perception of difference.”

“Does it go away, or do they get used to it?”

“Well, either, or both. Or neither. I don’t really know about that part of it. We focus on draining the hematoma and removing that pressure.”

It will or it won’t. “So if I’m not in too much distress, maybe I ought not to mess with it?” Frank said. He did not want to be looking forward to brain surgery; even clearing out his sinuses sounded pretty dire to him.

The doctor smiled ever so slightly, understanding him perfectly. “You certainly don’t want to take it lightly. However, there is a mass of blood in there, and often the first sign of it swelling more is a change in thinking or feeling, or a bad headache. Some people don’t want to risk that. And problems in decision making can be pretty debilitating. So, some people preempt any problems and choose to have the surgery.”

“Jeez,” Frank said, “this is just the kind of decision I can’t make anymore!”

The doctor laughed briefly, but his look was sympathetic. “It would be a hard call no matter what. Why don’t you give it a set period of time and see how you feel about it? Make some lists of pros and cons, mark on your symptom calendar how you feel about it for ten days running, stuff like that. See if one course of action is consistently supported over time.”

Frank sighed. Possibly he could construct an algorithm that would make this decision for him, by indicating the most robust course of action. Some kind of aid. Because it was a decision that he could not avoid; it was his call only. And doing nothing was a decision too. But possibly the wrong one. So he had to decide, he had to consciously decide. Possibly it was the most important decision he had before him right now.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try that.”

-

BACK AT WORK, FRANK TRIED to concentrate. He simply couldn’t do it. Or he concentrated, but it was on the word hematoma. Chronic subdural hematoma. There’s pressure on my brain. He thought, I can concentrate just fine, I can do it for hours at a time. I just can’t decide.

He closed his eyes, poked at his Things To Do list with a pen. That was what it had come to. Well, actually he had bundled three things to do in a military category, and now he realized he should have poked the GO TO THE PENTAGON item on the list, because Diane had told him to and he had made appointments, and today was the day. So there hadn’t been any choice to be made. Check the calendar first to avoid such tortures.

1) Navy, 2) Air Force, 3) Army Corps of Engineers, the list said. Secretary of the Navy’s office first: chief nuclear officer, happy to meet with the president’s science advisor’s advisor, Diane had said. Lunch at the Pentagon.

The Pentagon had its own Metro stop, just west of the Potomac. Frank came up out of the ground and walked the short distance to the steps leading up to the big doors of the place. These faced the river. From them it was impossible to see how big the Pentagon was; it looked like any plain concrete building, wide but not tall.

Inside there was a waiting room. He went through a metal detector, as at an airport, was nodded onward by a military policeman. At the desk beyond another MP took his driver’s license and checked his name against a list on his computer, then used a little spherical camera on top of the computer to take a picture of him. The MP took the photo from a printer and affixed it to a new ID badge, under a bar code, Frank’s name, and his host’s name. Frank took the badge from the man and clipped it to his shirt, waited in the waiting room. There was a table with promotional brochures, touting each of the services and its missions, also the last two wars.

The Navy’s chief nuclear officer was a Captain Ernest Gamble. He had been a physics professor at Annapolis. Cool and professional in style.

They walked down a very long hallway. Gamble took him up some stairs to an interior window, where the pentagonal inner park stood in the sunlight. Then it was onward, down another very long hallway. “They used to have little golf carts for the halls,” Gamble explained, “but people kept running them into things. It takes a long time to get repairs done here. The joke is, it took eighteen months to build the Pentagon, and ten years to remodel it.”

They passed a small shopping mall, which Frank was surprised to see there inside the Pentagon itself, and finally came to a restaurant, likewise deep inside the building. Sat down, ordered, went to a salad bar and loaded up. As they ate, they discussed the Navy’s nuclear energy capabilities. Ever since Admiral Hyman Rickover had taken over the nuclear fleet in the 1950s, the Navy’s nuclear program had been held to the highest possible safety standards, and had a spotless record, with not a single (unclassified) accident releasing more than fifty rads.

“What about classified accidents?”

“I wouldn’t know about those,” Gamble deadpanned.

In any case, the Navy had had no reactor accidents, and a half-century’s experience with design and operation. They discussed whether the Navy could lead the way in designing, maybe even overseeing, a number of federally funded “National Security Nuclear Plants.” That might avoid the cost-cutting disasters that free-market nuclear energy inevitably led to. It would also excuse the new power plants from those environmental regulations the military already had exemptions from. Overall those exemptions were a bad idea, but in this case, maybe not.

In effect, pursuing this plan would nationalize part of the country’s energy supply, Gamble pointed out. A bit of a Hugo Chavez move, he suggested, which would enrage the Wall Street Journal editorial page and its ilk. Between that and the environmental objections, there would be no lack of opponents to such a plan.

But the Navy, Frank suggested, had no reason to fear critics of any stripe. They did what Congress and the president asked them to do.

Gamble concurred. Then, without saying so outright, he conveyed to Frank the impression that the Navy brain trust might be happy to be tasked with some of the nation’s energy security. These days, global military strategy and technology had combined in a way that made navies indispensable but unglamorous; they functioned like giant water taxis for the other services. Ambition to do more was common in the secretary’s office, and over at Annapolis.

“Great,” Frank said. While listening to this artful description, vague but suggestive, something had occurred to him: “When there are blackouts, could the nuclear fleet serve as emergency generators?”

“Well, yes, if I understand you. They’ve done things like that before, doing emergency relief in Africa and Southeast Asia. Hook into the grid and power a town or a district.”

“How big a town?”

“The ships range from a few to several megawatt range. I think a Roosevelt-class aircraft carrier could power a town of a hundred thousand, maybe more.”

“I’d like to get the totals on that.”

Then lunch was over and it was time for 2) Air Force. A new aide appeared and escorted him around two bends of the Pentagon, to the Air Force hall. The walls here were decorated with giant oil paintings of various kinds of aircraft. Many of the gleaming planes were portrayed engaged in aerial dogfights, the enemy planes going down under curved pillars of smoke and flames. It was like being in a war-crazed teenager’s bedroom.

The Air Force’s chief scientist was an academic, appointed for a two-year stint. Frank asked him about the possibility of the Air Force getting involved in space-based solar power, and the rapid deployment thereof. The chief scientist was optimistic about this. Solar collectors doing photovoltaic in orbit, beaming the power down in microwaves to Earth, there to be captured by power plants, which became capture-and-transfer centers, rather than generating plants per se. Have to avoid frying too many birds and bees with the microwaves, not unlike the wind turbine problem in that regard, otherwise pretty straightforward, technically, and with the potential to be exceptionally, almost amazingly, clean.

But?

“You would need a big honking booster to lift all that hardware into space,” the chief scientist said. Maybe something that had horizontal takeoffs and landings both, some kind of ramjet thing. In any case a major new booster, like the old Saturn rocket, so foolishly canceled at the end of Apollo, but modernized by all that a half-century’s improvements in materials and design could give it. A good booster could make the shuttle look like the weird and dangerous contraption it had always been.

“Much progress on that, then?” Frank asked.

The matter had been studied, and some starts made, but it could not be said to be going full speed yet. Even though it was a crucial part of a full clean energy solution.

“What have people been thinking this last decade or two?” Frank wondered once. “Why not do the obvious things?”

The chief scientist shrugged; a rhetorical question, obviously. Only Edgardo would bother to shout out Because we are stupid!

Frank said, “Could the Air Force itself commission a big booster, as a defense priority?”

“Well, it’s supposed to be NASA’s thing. And there’s lots of people nervous about what they call militarizing space.”

“Can NASA do it?”

Another shrug, very expressive. NASA was tricky, small, often very messed up. Maybe the Air Force could partner with them, try to help without being too intrusive.

“Even fund it,” Frank suggested.

But of course that brought up the problem of “reprogrammed funds,” as General Wracke had described to him the year before. Really something like that could only be Congress’s call. Again. But the Air Force would be willing to advocate such a thing to Congress, sure. They would serve as called on.

So. Frank thanked the man and was escorted around to the Army hall, for his 3) Army Corps of Engineers meeting.

But here it turned out General Wracke had been called away unexpectedly, so his escort led him back to the waiting room, the only place where he could exit the building.

Back onto the Metro (and who had built that?), he tried to work it out. Navy helps Energy, Air Force helps NASA, Army Corps of Engineers helps all the land-based infrastructure, including carbon sequestration and shoreline stabilization. Together with all the other mitigation efforts, they would be terraforming the Earth. It was, after all, a matter of national defense. Defense of all the nations, but never mind. Republic in danger; the military should be involved. Especially given their budget. A military as big as all the other militaries on the planet, working for a country that had explicitly renounced any imperial ambitions or world police responsibilities, which it wanted to cede over to the UN as a globalized world project. That meant there was now a gigantic budget and productive capacity, extending into the private sector in the form of the military’s many contractors, that did not have all that much to do. It was an instantaneous investment overhang. Maybe it could be devoted to the mitigation project. The Swiss Army did work like that. Frank wondered if the FCCSET program could be used to coordinate all these federal efforts, perhaps out of the OMB. Construct an overarching mission architecture.

He wondered if the FBI could be sicced on black-black programs that had taken off on their own and hidden within the greater intelligence and security morass.

It was hard to imagine how all this would work, but Frank felt that here he was baffled not by his own cognitive problems, but by the sheer size and complexity of the federal government, and of the problem. In any case one thing was clear: there was serious money being disbursed out of the Pentagon. If they were interested in trying to help with this, it could be an incredible resource.

In the private sphere, meanwhile, it was time to find and talk to big pools of accumulated capital. As, for instance, the reinsurance companies, with total assets in the ten-trillion-dollar range. Next item on the list. If he could only keep this busy, there would be no need to decide anything. Or to wonder where Caroline was and why she hadn’t contacted him yet.

The reinsurance companies had underwritten most of the previous year’s North Atlantic salt fleet, so they were already acquainted with the huge costs of such projects, but also were the world’s experts in the even bigger costs of ignoring problems. They had been the one who ultimately had paid for the long winter, and they had their cost-benefit algorithms. And they were already well acquainted with the concept of robust decision making—something very desirable to them, as being less destructive to their business over the long haul.

Diane had invited representatives of the four big reinsurance companies to meet with her global-warming task force. About twenty people filled the conference room in the Old Executive Offices, including Anna, over for the day from NSF.

After Diane welcomed them, she got to the point in her usual style, and invited Kenzo to share what was known about the situation in the North Atlantic and more globally. Kenzo waved at his PowerPoint slides like a pops orchestra conductor. Then one of the reinsurance nat cat (natural catastrophe) guys from Swiss Re gave a talk which made it clear that in insurance terms, sea-level rise was the worst impact of all. A quarter of humanity lived on the coastlines of the world. About a fifth of the total human infrastructure was at risk, he said, if sea level rose even two meters; and this was the current best guess as to what might happen in the coming decade. And if the breakup of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet went all the way, they were facing a rise of seven meters.

It was something you could be aware of without quite comprehending. They sat around the table pondering it.

Frank seized his pen, squeezed it as if it were his recalcitrant brain. “I’ve been looking at some numbers,” he said haltingly. “Postulating, for a second, that we have developed really significant clean energy generation, then, observe, the amount of water displaced by the detached Antarctic ice so far is on the order of forty thousand cubic kilometers. Now, there are a number of these basins in the Sahara Desert and all across central Asia, and in the basin and range country of North America. Also in southern Africa. In effect, the current position of the continents and the trade wind patterns have desiccated all land surfaces around the thirtieth latitudes north and south, and in the south that doesn’t mean much, but in the north it means a huge land area dried out. All those basins together have a theoretical capacity of about sixty thousand cubic kilometers.”

He looked up from his laptop briefly, and it was as he had expected; they were looking at him like he was a bug. He shrugged and looked back at the PowerPoint, and forged on:

“So, you could pump a lot of the excess sea water into these empty basins in the thirties, and perhaps stabilize the ocean’s sea level proper.”

“Holy moly,” Kenzo said in the silence after it was clear Frank was done. “You’d alter the climate in those regions tremendously if you did that.”

“No doubt,” Frank said. “But you know, since the climate is going haywire anyway, it’s kind of like, so what? In the context of everything else, will we even be able to distinguish what this would do from all the rest?”

Kenzo laughed.

“Well,” Frank said defensively to the silent room, “I thought I’d at least run the numbers.”

“It would take an awful lot of power to pump that much water inland,” Anna said.

“I have no idea what kind of climate alteration you would get if you did that,” Kenzo said happily.

Frank said, “Did the Salton Sea change anything downwind of it?”

“Well, but we’re talking like a thousand Salton Seas here,” Kenzo said. He was still bug-eyed at the idea; he had never even imagined curating such a change, and he was looking at Frank as if to say, Why didn’t you mention something this cool out on our runs? “It would be a real test of our modeling programs,” he said, looking even happier. Almost giddy: “It might change everything!” he exclaimed.

“And yet,” Frank said. “People might judge those changes to be preferable to displacing a quarter of the world’s population. Remember what happened to New Orleans. We couldn’t afford to have ten thousand of those, could we?”

“If you had the unlimited power you’re talking about,” Anna said suddenly, “why couldn’t you just pump the equivalent of the displaced water back up onto the Antarctic polar plateau? Let it freeze back up there, near where it came from?”

Again the room was silent.

“Now there’s an idea,” Diane said. She was smiling. “But Frank, where are these dry basins again?”

Frank brought that slide back up on the PowerPoint. The basins, if all of them were entirely filled, could take about twenty percent of the predicted rise in sea level if the whole WAIS came off. It would take about thirty terawatts to move the water. The cost in carbon for that much energy would be ten gigatons, not good, but only a fraction of the overall carbon budget at this point. Clean energy would be better for doing it, of course. What effects on local climates and ecologies would be caused by the introduction of so many big new lakes was, as Kenzo had said, impossible to calculate.

“Those are some very dry countries,” Diane said after perusing Frank’s map. “Dry and poor. I can imagine, if they were offered compensation to take the water and make new lakes, some of them might decide to roll the dice and take the environmental risk, because net effects might end up being positive. It might make opportunities for them that aren’t there now. There’s not much going on in the Takla Makan these days, that I know of.”

The Swiss Re executive returned to Anna’s comment, suggesting that the system might be able go through proof of concept in Antarctica, after which, if it worked, countries signing on would have a better idea of what they were in for. Antarctic operations would incur extra costs, to keep pumps and pipelines heated; on the other hand, the environmental impacts were likely to be minimal, and population relocation not an issue at all. Maybe they could even relocate the excess ocean water entirely on the Antarctic polar cap. That would mean shifting water that floated away from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet up to the top of the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet.

“Of course if we’re going to talk about stupendous amounts of new free energy,” Anna pointed out, “you could do all sorts of things. You could desalinate the sea water at the pumps or at their outlets, and make them fresh water lakes in the thirties, so you wouldn’t have Salton Sea problems. You’d have reservoirs of drinking and irrigation water, you could replenish groundwater, and build with salt bricks, and so on.”

Diane nodded. “True.”

“But we don’t have stupendous new sources of clean energy,” Anna said.

Good photovoltaics existed, Frank reminded her doggedly. Also a good Stirling engine; good wind power; and extremely promising ocean energy-to-electricity systems.

That was all very well, Diane agreed. That was promising. But there remained the capital investment problem, and the other transitional costs associated with changing over to any of these clean renewables. Who was going to pay for it?

It was the trillion-dollar question.

Here the reinsurance people took center stage. They had paid for the salting of the North Atlantic by using their reserves, then upping their premiums. Their reserves were huge, as they had to be to meet their obligations to the many insurance companies paying them for reinsurance. But swapping out the power generation system was two magnitudes larger a problem, more or less, than the salt fleet had been, and it was impossible to front that kind of money—almost impossible to imagine collecting it in any way.

“Well, but it’s only four years of the American military budget,” Frank pointed out.

People shrugged, as if to say, but still—that was a lot.

“It’s going to take legislation,” Diane said. “Private investment can’t do it. Can’t or won’t.”

General agreement, although the reinsurance guys looked unhappy. “It would be good if it made sense in market terms,” the Swiss Re executive said.

This led them to a discussion of macroeconomics, but even there, they kept coming back to the idea of major public works. No matter what kind of economic ideology you brought to the table, the world they had set up was resolutely Keynesian—meaning a mixed economy in which government and business existed in an uneasy interaction. Public works projects were sometimes crucial to the process, especially in emergencies, but that meant legislating economic activity, and so they needed to have the political understanding and support it would take to do that. If so, they could legislate investment, and then in effect print the money to pay for it. That was standard Keynesian practice, a kind of pump-priming used by governments ever since the third New Deal of 1938, as Diane told them now, with World War II itself an even bigger example.

Other economic stimuli might also complement this old standby. Edgardo had done some studies here, and it could all be handed to Chase as a kind of program, a mission architecture. A list of Things To Do.

After that, they heard a report from the Russian environmental office. The altered tree lichens they had distributed in Siberia the previous summer were surviving the winter there like any ordinary lichen. Dispersal had been widespread, uptake on trees rapid, as the engineers at Small Delivery Systems had hoped for.

The only problem the Russian could see was that it was possible, at least in theory, that the lichen dispersal would become too successful. What they were seeing now led them to think they might have overseeded, or actually overdispersed. Since most of what they had dispersed had survived, by next summer the Siberian forest around the site would reap whatever the winds and the Russians had sown. In the lab it was proving to grow more like algal blooms encased in mushrooms than like ordinary lichens. “Fast lichen, we call it,” the Russian said. “We didn’t think it was possible, but we see it happening.”

All that was very interesting, but when Frank got back in his office, he found that his computer wouldn’t turn on. And when the techs arrived to check it out, they went pale, and isolated the machine quickly, then carried the whole thing away. “That’s one bad virus,” one of them said. “Very dangerous.”

“So was I hacked in particular?” Frank asked.

“We usually see that one when someone has been targeted. A real poke in the eye. Did you back up your disks?”

“Well…”

“You better have. That’s a complete loss there.”

“A hard-drive crash?”

“A hard-drive bombing. You’ll have to file and report, and they’ll be adding you to the case file. Someone did this to you on purpose.”

Frank felt a chill.

-

CHARLIE’S DAYTIME OUTINGS WITH JOE had to happen on the weekends now. Even though they were past the First Sixty Days and had had a pretty good run with them, they were trying to keep the momentum going, and things kept popping up to derail the plans, sometimes intentional problems created by the opposition, sometimes neutral matters created by the sheer size and complexity of the system. Roy was pushing so hard that sometimes he even almost lost his cool. Charlie had never seen that, and would have thought it impossible, at least on the professional level. In personal matters, Roy and Andrea had gone through a spectacular in-office breakup, and during that time Charlie had endured some long and bitter rants from Roy. But when it came to business, Roy had always prided himself on staying calm. Calmness at speed was his signature style, as with certain surfing stars. And even now he persisted with that style, or tried to; but the workload was so huge it was hard to keep the calmness along with the pace. They were far past the time when he and Charlie were able to chat about things like they used to. Now their phone conversations went something like:

“Charlie it’s Roy have you met with IPCC?”

“No, we’re both scheduled to meet with the World Bank on Friday.”

“Can you meet them and the Bank team at six today instead?”

“I was going to go home at five.”

“Six then?”

“Well if you think—”

“Good okay more soon bye.”

“Bye.”—said to the empty connection.

Charlie stared at his cell phone and cursed. He cursed Roy, Phil, Congress, the World Bank, the Republican Party, the world, and the universe. Because it was nobody’s fault.

He hit the cell phone button for the daycare.

He was going to have to carve time for an in-person talk with Roy, a talk about what he could and couldn’t do. That would be an unusual meeting. Even though Charlie was now at the White House fifty hours a week, he still never saw Roy in person; Roy was always somewhere else. They spoke on the phone even when one of them was in the West Wing and the other in the Old Executive Offices, less than a hundred yards away. For a second Charlie couldn’t even remember what Roy looked like.

So; call to arrange for “extended stay” for Joe, a development his teachers were used to. Another exception to the supposed schedule. Because they needed the World Bank executing Phil’s program; in the war of the agencies, now fully engaged, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were among the most mulish of their passive-aggressive opponents. Phil had the power to hire and fire the upper echelons in both agencies, which was good leverage, but it would be better to do something less drastic, to keep the midlevels from shattering. This meeting with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN organization, might be a good venue for exerting some pressure. The IPCC had spent many years advocating action on the climate front, and all the while they had been flatly ignored by the World Bank. If there was now a face-off, a great reckoning in a little room, then it could get interesting.

But the meeting, held across the street in the World Bank’s headquarters, was a disappointment. These two groups came from such different world-views that it was only an illusion they were speaking the same language; for the most part they used different vocabularies, and when by chance they used the same words, they meant different things by them. They were aware at some level of this underlying conflict, but could not address it; and so everyone was tense, with old grievances unsayable and yet fully present.

The World Bank guys said something about nothing getting cheaper than oil for the next fifty years, ignoring what the IPCC guys had just finished saying about the devastating effects fifty more years of oil burning would have. They had not heard that, apparently. They defended having invested 94 percent of the World Bank’s energy investments in oil exploration as necessary, given the world’s dependence on oil—apparently unaware of the circular aspect of their argument. And, being economists, they were still exteriorizing costs without even noticing it or acknowledging such exteriorization had been conclusively demonstrated to falsify accounts of profit and loss. It was as if the world were not real—as if the actual physical world, reported on by scientists and witnessed by all, could be ignored, and because their entirely fictitious numbers therefore added up, no one could complain.

Charlie gritted his teeth as he listened and took notes. This was science versus capitalism, yet again. The IPCC guys spoke for science and said the obvious things, pointing out the physical constraints of the planet, the carbon load now in the atmosphere altering everything, and the resultant need for heavy investment in clean replacement technologies by all concerned, including the World Bank, as one of the great drivers of globalization. But they had said it before to no avail, and so it was happening again. The World Bank guys talked about rates of return and the burden on investors, and the unacceptable doubling of the price of a kilowatt hour. Everyone there had said all of this before, with the same lack of communication and absence of concrete results.

Charlie saw that the meeting was useless. He thought of Joe, over at the daycare. He had never stayed there long enough even to see what they did all day long. Guilt stuck him like a sliver. In a crowd of strangers, fourteen hours a day. The Bank guy was going on about differential costs, “and that’s why it’s going to be oil for the next twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty years,” he concluded. “None of the alternatives are competitive.”

Charlie’s pencil tip snapped. “Competitive for what?” he demanded.

He had not spoken until that point, and now the edge in his voice stopped the discussion. Everyone was staring at him. He stared back at the World Bank guys.

“Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in your model no one pays it. The carbon that British Petroleum burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a damage bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so actually it’s thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported a profit of twenty-three billion, but if you added the damage cost it would be eight billion in the red. These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. You’re helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five hundred gigatons of carbon that you are describing as inevitable because of your financial shell games, then two-thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It’s the stupidest head-in-the-sand response possible.”

The World Bank guys flinched at this. “Well,” one of them said, “we don’t see it that way.”

Charlie said, “That’s the trouble. You see it the way the banking industry sees it, and they make money by manipulating money irrespective of effects in the real world. You’ve spent a trillion dollars of American taxpayers’ money over the lifetime of the Bank, and there’s nothing to show for it. You go into poor countries and force them to sell their assets to foreign investors and to switch from subsistence agriculture to cash crops, then when the prices of those crops collapse you call this nicely competitive on the world market. The local populations starve and you then insist on austerity measures even though your actions have shattered their economy. You order them to cut their social services so they can pay off their debts to you and to your financial community investors, and you devalue their real assets and then buy them on the cheap and sell them elsewhere for more. The assets of that country have been strip-mined and now belong to international finance. That’s your idea of development. You were intended to be the Marshall Plan, and instead you’ve been the United Fruit Company.”

One of the World Bank guys muttered, “But tell us what you really think,” while putting his papers in his briefcase. His companion snickered, and this gave him courage to continue: “I’m not gonna stay and listen to this,” he said.

“That’s fine,” Charlie said. “You can leave now and get a head start on looking for a new job.”

The man blinked hostilely at him. But he did not otherwise move.

Charlie stared at him for a while, working to collect himself. He lowered his voice and spoke as calmly as he could manage. He outlined the basics of the new mission architecture, including the role that the World Bank was now to play; but he couldn’t handle going into detail with people who were now furious at him, and in truth had never been listening. It was time for what Frank called limited discussion. So Charlie wrapped it up, then gave them a few copies of the mission architecture outline, thick books that had been bound just that week. “Your part of the plan is here in concept. Take it back and talk it over with your people, and come to us with your plan to enact it. We look forward to hearing your ideas. I’ve got you scheduled for a meeting on the sixth of next month, and I’ll expect your report then.” Although, since we will be decapitating your organization, it won’t be you guys doing the reporting, he didn’t add.

And he gathered his papers and left the room.

Well, shit. What a waste of everyone’s time.

He had been sweating, and now out on the street he chilled. His hands were shaking. He had lost it. It was amazing how angry he had gotten. Phil had told him to go in and kick ass, but it did no good to yell at people like that. It had been unprofessional; out of control; counterproductive. Only senators got to rave like that. Staffers, no.

Well, what was done was done. Now it was time to pick up Joe and go home. Anna wouldn’t believe what he had done. In fact, he realized, he would not be able to tell her about it, not in full; she would be too appalled. She would say “Oh Charlie” and he would be ashamed of himself.

But at least it was time to get Joe. At this point he had been at daycare for twelve hours exactly. “Damn it,” Charlie said viciously, all of a sudden as angry as he had been in the meeting; and then, glad that he had shouted at them. Years of repressed anger at the fatuous destructiveness of the World Bank and the system they worked for had been released all at once; the wonder was he had been as polite as he had. The anger still boiled in him uselessly, caustic to his own poor gut.

Joe, however, seemed unconcerned by his long day. “Hi Dad!” he said brightly from the blocks and trucks corner, where he had the undivided attention of a young woman who reminded Charlie of their old Gymboree friend Asta. “We’re playing chess!”

“Wow,” Charlie said, startled; but by the girl’s sweet grin, and the chess pieces strewn about the board and the floor, he saw that it was Joe’s version of chess, and the mayhem had been severe. “That’s really good, Joe! But now I’m here and it’s time, so can we help clean up and go?”

“Okay Dad.”

On the Metro ride home, Joe seemed tired but happy. “We had Cheerios for snack.”

“Oh good, you like Cheerios. Are you still hungry?”

“No, I’m good. Are you hungry, Dad?”

“Well, yes, a little bit.”

“Wanna cracker?” And he produced a worn fragment of a Wheat Thin from his pants pocket, dusted with lint.

“Thanks, Joe, that’s nice. Sure, I’ll take it.” He took the cracker and ate it. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Beggars?”

“People who don’t have anything. People who ask you for money.”

“Money?”

“You know, money. The stuff people pay for things with, when they buy them.”

“Buy them?”

“Come on Joe. Please. It’s hard to explain what money is. Dollars. Quarters. Beggars are people who don’t have much money and they don’t have much of a way to get money. All they’ve got is the World Bank ripping their hearts out and eating their lives. So, the saying means, when you’re like a beggar, you can’t be too picky about choosing things when they’re offered to you.”

“What about Han? Is she too picky?”

“Well, I don’t know. Who’s Han?”

“Han is the morning teacher. She doesn’t like bagels.”

“I see! Well, that sounds too picky to me.”

“Right,” Joe said. “You get what you get.”

“That’s true,” Charlie said.

“You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit!” Joe declared, and beamed. Obviously this was a saying often repeated at the daycare. A mantra of sorts.

“That’s very true,” Charlie said. “Although to tell you the truth, I did just throw a fit.”

“Oh well.” Joe was observing the people getting on at the UDC stop, and Charlie looked up too. Students and workers, all going home late. “These things happen,” Joe said. He sat leaning against Charlie, his body relaxed, murmuring something to the tiny plastic soldier grasped in his fist, looking at the people in their bright-pink-seated car.

Then they were at the Bethesda stop, and off and up the long escalator to the street, and walking down Wisconsin together with the cars roaring by.

“Dad, let’s go in and get a cookie! Cookie!”

It was that block’s Starbucks, one of Joe’s favorite places.

“Oh Joe, we’ve got to get home, Mom and Nick are waiting to see us, they miss us.”

“Sure Dad. Whatever you say Dad.”

“Please, Joe! Don’t say that!”

“Okay Dad.”

Charlie shook his head as they walked on, his throat tight. He clutched Joe’s hand and let Joe swing their arms up and down.