Sixty Days and Counting

-

Pleasure is a brain mechanism. It’s a product of natural selection, so it must help to make us more adaptive. Sexual attraction is an index of likely sexual pleasure.

Frank stopped in his reading. Was that true?

The introduction to this book claimed the collected sociobiological papers in it studied female sexual attractiveness exclusively because there were more data about it. Yeah right. Also, female sexual attractiveness was easier to see and describe and quantify, as it had more to do with physical qualities than with abstract attributes such as status or prowess or sense of humor. Yeah right! What about the fact that the authors of the articles were all male? Would Hrdy agree with any of these justifications? Or would she laugh outright?

Evolutionary psychology studies the adaptations made to solve the information-processing problems our ancestors faced over the last couple million years. The problems? Find food; select habitat; stay safe; choose a mate. Obviously the brain must solve diverse problems in different domains. No general-purpose brain mechanism to solve all problems, just as no general-purpose organ to solve all physiological problems. Food choice very different from mate choice, for instance.

Was this true? Was not consciousness itself precisely the general-purpose brain mechanism this guy claimed did not exist? Maybe it was like blood, circulating among the organs. Or the whole person as a gestalt decision maker. One decision after another.

Anyway, mate choice: or rather, males choosing females. Sexual attraction had something to do with it. (Was this true?) Potential mates vary in mate value. Mate value could be defined as how much the mate increases reproductive success of the male making the choice. (Was this true?) Reproductive success potential can be determined by a number of variables. Information about some of these variables was available in specific observable characteristics of female bodies. Men were therefore always watching very closely. (This was true.)

Reproductive variables: age, hormonal status, fecundity, birth history.

A nubile female was one having begun ovulation, but never yet pregnant. Primitive population menarche average start, 12.4 years; first births at 16.8 years; peak fertility between 20 and 24 years; last births at around 40 years. In the early environment in which they evolved, women almost always were married by nubility (were they sure?). The biological fathers of women’s children were likely to be their husbands. Women started reproducing shortly after nubility, one child every three or four years, each child nursed intensively for a few years, which suppressed conception.

A male who married a nubile female had the maximum opportunity to father her offspring during her most fecund years, and would monopolize those years from their start, thus presumably not be investing in other men’s children.

If mate selection had been for the short term only, maximal fecundity would be preferred to nubility, because chance of pregnancy was better at that point. Sexual attraction to nubility rather than maximal fecundity indicates it was more a wife detector than a short-term, one-time mother detector.

Was this true?

In the early environment, female reproductive time lasted about 26 years, from 16 to 42, but this included average of 6 years of pregnancy, and 18 years of lactation. Thus females were pregnant or nursing for 24 of the relevant 26 years, or 92 percent of reproductive life. So, between first average birth age (17) and last conception age (39), average woman was nonpregnant and nonlactating for two years; thus 26 ovulations total. Say three days of fecundity per cycle, thus females were capable of conceiving on only 78 of 8,030 days, or one percent of the time. Thus only about one in a hundred random copulations could potentially result in conception.

Did this make sense? It seemed to Frank that several parts of an algorithm had been crunched into one calculation, distorting all findings. Numbers for numbers’ sake: specifics following an averaging was one sign, “random copulations” another, because there were no such things; but that was the only way they could get the figure to be as low as one percent.

In any case, following the argument, a nubile woman before first pregnancy was more fecund than a fully fecund woman in her early twenties, if one were considering her lifetime potential. And so nubility cues were fertility cues, as males considered their whole futures as fathers. (But did they?) Thus natural selection assigned maximum sexual attractiveness to nubility cues. And this attraction to nubility rather than fecundity indicated monogamous tendencies; male wants long-term cohabitation, with its certainty about parentage for as many offspring as possible.

And what were nubility cues? Skin texture, muscle tone, stretch marks, breast shape, facial configuration, and waist-to-hip ratio. All these indexed female age and parity. Female sexual attractiveness varied inversely with WHR, which was lowest at nubility; higher when both younger and older. Etc. Even the face was a reliable physical indicator. (Frank laughed.) Selection showed a preference for average features. This was asserted because students in a test were asked to choose a preferred composite; the “beautiful composite,” as created by both male and female subjects, had a shorter bottom half of the face than average, typical of a twelve-year-old girl; full lips in vertical dimension, but smaller mouth than true average. Higher cheekbones than true average, larger eyes relative to face size; thinner jaw; shorter distances between nose and mouth, and between mouth and chin. High cheekbones and relatively short lower face and gracile jaw indicated youth, low testosterone/estrogen ratio, and nullipara. Bilateral symmetry was preferred. Deviation in hard tissue reduced sexual attractiveness more than the same amount of deviation in say nose form, which could have resulted from minor mishap indicating little about design quality. Ah, Francesca Taolini’s beautiful crooked nose, explained at last!

As was “masticatory efficiency.” This was the one that had gotten Frank and Anna laughing so hard, that day when Frank had first run across the study. Sexy chewing.

In the early environment, total body fat and health were probably correlated, so fat, what little could be accumulated, was good. Now that was reversed, and thinner meant both younger and healthier. Two possible readings, therefore, EE and modern. Which might explain why all women looked good to Frank, each in her own way. He was adaptable, he was optimodal, he was the paleolithic postmodern!

Were women evaluating men as mates in exactly the same way? Yes; but not exactly. A woman always knew her children were biologically hers. Mate choice thus could focus on different criteria than in effect capturing all of a mate’s fecundity. Here is where the sociobiologist Hrdy had led the way, by examining and theorizing female choice.

Patriarchy could thus be seen as a group attempt by men to be more sure of parentage, by controlling access. Men becoming jailers, men going beyond monogamy to an imprisoning polygamy, as an extension of the original adaptive logic—but an extension that was an obvious reductio ad absurdum, ending in the seraglio. Patriarchy did not eliminate male competition for mates; on the contrary, because of the reductio ad absurdum, male competition became more necessary than ever. And the more force available, the more intense the competition. Thus patriarchy as a solution to the parentage problem led to hatred, war, misogyny, gynophobia, harems, male control of reproductive rights, including anti-abortion laws (those photos of a dozen fat men grinning as they signed a law on a stage) and, ultimately, taken all in all, patriarchy led directly to the general very nonadaptive insanity that they lived in now.

Was that true? Did sociobiology show how and why they had gone crazy as a species? Could they, using that knowledge, work backwards to sanity? Had there ever been sanity? Could they create sanity for the first time, by understanding all the insanities that had come before? By looking at adaptation and its accidental by-products, and its peacock exaggerations past the point of true function?

And could Frank figure out what he should do about his own mating issues? It brought on a kind of nausea to be so undecided.

-

MOST OF THE KHEMBALIS still in the D.C. area were now moving out to their farm in Maryland. The compound was nearly finished, and although a thin layer of hard snow still lay on most of the ground, spring was springing, and they were beginning to clear the area they wanted to cultivate with crops. They rented a giant rototiller, and a little tractor of their own was on its way. Sucandra was excited. “I always wanted to be a farmer,” he said. “I dreamed about it for years, when we were in prison. Now we are going to try what crops will thrive here.” He gestured: “It looks just like it did in my dream.”

“When the ground thaws,” Frank suggested.

“Spring is coming. It’s almost the equinox.”

“But growing season here starts late, doesn’t it?”

“Not compared to Tibet.”

“Ah.”

Sucandra said, “Will you move out here with us, and build your treehouse?”

“I don’t know. I need to talk it over with Rudra.”

“He says he wants to. Qang wonders if he should stay closer to hospital.”

“Ah. What’s wrong with him, do they know?”

Sucandra shrugged. “Old. Worn out.”

“I suppose.”

“He will not stay much longer in that body.”

Frank was startled. “Has he got something, you know—progressive?”

Sucandra smiled. “Life is progressive.”

“Yes.” But he’s only eighty-one, Frank didn’t say. That might be far beyond the average life span for Tibetans. He felt a kind of tightness in him.

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said at last. “I mean, I’ll stay where he is. So—maybe for now I’ll just work on the treehouse, and stay in Arlington with him. If that’s okay.”

“That would be fine, of course. Thank you for thinking of it that way.”

Disturbed, Frank went up the hill to the copse of trees at the high point.

He walked around in the grove, trying to concentrate. They were beautiful trees, big, old, intertwined into a canopy shading the hilltop. Snow filled every crevice of the bark on their north sides. If only they lived as long as trees. He went back to his van and got his climbing and window-washing gear, and trudged back up the hill. It was sunny but cold, a stiff west wind blowing. He knew that up in the branches it would be colder still. He wasn’t really in the mood to climb a tree, and you needed to be in the mood. It was more dangerous than most rock climbing.

But, however, here he was. Time to amp up and ramp up, as they used to say in the window-washing business—often before smoking huge reefers and downing extra-tall cups of 7-Eleven coffee, admittedly—but the point still held. One needed to get psyched and pay attention. Crampons, linesman’s harness, strap around, kick in, deep breath. Up, up, up!

Eyes streaming in the cold wind. Blink several times to clear vision. Through the heavy lowest branches, up to the level under the canopy, where big branches from different trees intertwined. In the wind he could see the independent motion of all the branches. Hard to imagine, offhand, what that might mean in terms of a treehouse. If an extensive treehouse were to rest on branches from more than one tree, wouldn’t it vibrate or bounce at cross-purposes, rather than sway all of a piece, as his little Rock Creek treehouse did? An interference pattern, on the other hand, might be like living in a perpetual earthquake. Not good. What was needed was a big central room, set firmly on one big trunk in the middle, with the other rooms set independently on branches of their own—yes—much like the Swiss Family treehouse at Disneyland. He had heard it was the Tarzan treehouse now, but he wasn’t willing to accept that. Anyway the design was sound. He saw the potential branches, made a first sketch on a little pocket notebook page, hanging there. It could be good.

And yet he wasn’t looking forward to it.

Then he saw that the smallest branches around him were studded with tiny green buds. They were the particular light vivid green that was still new to Frank, that he had never seen in his life until the previous spring, out in Rock Creek Park: deciduous bud green. An East Coast phenomenon. The color of spring. Ah yes: spring! Could spring ever be far behind? The so-called blocked moments, the times of stasis, were never really still at all. Change was constant, whether you could see it or not. Best then to focus on the new green buds, bursting out everywhere.

Thoreau said the same, the next morning. Frank read it aloud: “March fans it, April christens it, and May puts on its jacket and trousers. It never grows up, but is ever springing, bud following close upon leaf, and when winter comes it is not annihilated, but creeps on mole-like under the snow, showing its face occasionally by fuming springs and watercourses.”

Rudra nodded. “Henry sees things. ‘The flower opens, and lo! another year.’”

Thoughts of spring came to Frank often in the days that followed, partly because of the green now all over town, and partly because Chase kept referring to his first sixty days as a new spring. It struck Frank again when he went with Diane and Edgardo over to the White House to witness the dedication of the new solar projects. Phil had ordered that photovoltaic panels be put in place (be put back in place, as Carter had done it in his time) to power the White House. When there was some debate as to which system should be installed, he had instructed them to put in three or four different systems, to make a kind of test.

The purple-blue of the photovoltaic panels was like another kind of spring color, popping out in the snowy flowerbeds. Phil made a little speech, after which he was to be driven to Norfolk naval station; he had already had the Secret Service swap out his transport fleet, so now instead of a line of black SUVs pulling through the security gate, it was a line of black bulletproof Priuses. These looked so small that everyone laughed; they resembled the miniature cars that Shriners drove in parades. Chase laughed hardest of all, jumping out and directing the traffic so that the little cars made a circle around him. As he waved good-bye to the crowd, Frank noticed that he wore two wedding bands, one on his left ring finger, the other on the little finger of his right hand.

The White House demonstration project was only a tiny part of the solar power debate raging through NSF, the Department of Energy, and, Frank supposed, the world at large. Sudden effort to find the holy grail. It looked like desperation, and to a certain extent it was. But it was also that volatile time that came early in the history of any new technology, when decisions about many of the basic structures and methods emerged from a general confusion.

The small scale of this test was not going to be fair to Stirling engines in competition with photovoltaic. PV panels could be scaled to any size, which made them best for home use, while the external heat engine required a group of mirrors big enough to heat the heating element fully and drive the pistons to maximum output. It was a system meant for power plants. So the test here was only a PR thing. Still, not a bad idea. To see the systems creating electricity, even on cloudy days, was suddenly to understand that they had the means for the world’s deliverance already at hand. Paradoxically, the units on the south lawn shifted the attention from technology to finance. Now Chase was talking about tax credits for home installations that were big enough that the cost of a system would be the equivalent of about three years of electricity bills. A subsidy like that would make a huge difference. The cost to the federal budget would be about a tenth the cost of the last war. The main problem then would be manufacturing enough silicon.

One of the workmen scaling the southwest corner of the White House was having trouble, even though belayed from the roof. Frank shook his head, thinking: I could do better than that. Cutter and his friends could do better than that.

Kayaking was fun. The ice had broken up, and Frank, Charlie, and Drepung had joined a program at the Georgetown boathouse which gave them a couple of lessons, and then renting privileges for Charlie and Drepung; Frank had an old blue kayak of his own. Now their routine was to try to meet every other weekend to paddle around, playing on the slight riffles in the Potomac upstream from the Key Bridge. These riffles, however small compared to the drops at Great Falls, nevertheless involved an immense flow of water, and were fun to struggle up and shoot down. They could practice on them until they were good enough for Great Falls, Frank would say. Great Falls had a variety of white-water runs on the Maryland side, spanning a wide range of difficulties. Charlie and Drepung would nod at this information while glancing at each other, in full solidarity to resist any such improvement.

Drepung, it seemed to Charlie, was doing well, despite all the bustle at the embassy; in high spirits because of the move to the farm, and Phil taking office, and probably just the sheer fact of spring. He was young, the cherry blossoms were blossoming, and the Wizards were in the playoffs. He had an iPod that he had programmed with everything from the Dixie Chicks to the Diamond Sutra. Charlie often saw him bopping up their sidewalk in his oversized running shoes, snapping his fingers to some iPodded beat or other, not fast or slow, but in the groove. The bopper with the Betty Boop face, his gaze curiously fresh, direct, warm, open—a kind of hail, or greeting, even a challenge—a look unusual in D.C., the world capital of insincere sincerity.

Now Drepung paddled by and said, “I know that you said that when Phil Chase said to us, I’ll see what I can do, he was only using the usual Washington code for ‘No.’ But I am thinking now that maybe he meant it literally.”

“Could be,” Charlie opined cautiously. “What makes you think so?”

“Well, because he has apparently called up the State Department, and told someone in the South Asia division to get hold of us and set up a meeting with him. There’s even some of the China people to be included in this meeting.”

“Chinese people?”

“No, China people. State Department foreign service people who specialize in China. Sridar has been trying to set up such a meeting with them for months and months, but with no success. And now we have a date and an agenda of topics. And all because of this request from President Chase.”

“Amazing how that happens.”

“Yes, isn’t it? We are going to see what we can do!”

Later that spring, when the time came to move to Maryland, Frank drove Rudra out there in his van. Everything they had had in the garden shed barely covered the floor of the van’s rear. This was pleasing, but leaving their garden shed was not. As Frank closed and locked the door for the last time, he felt a pang of nostalgia. Another life gone. Some feelings were like vague clouds passing through one, others were as specific as the prick of acupuncture needles.

As they drove up the George Washington Parkway he still felt uneasy about leaving, and he thought maybe Rudra did too. He had left the garden shed without a look back, but now he was staring silently out at the Potomac. Very hard to tell what he might be thinking. Which was true of everyone of course.

The farm was bristling with people. They had built the treehouse in the hilltop grove, using Frank’s design but augmenting it in several ways. Once, right after they had begun to build it, he had tried to help in the actual construction of the thing, but when he saw some of the Khembali carpenters pulling out a beam that he had nailed in, he had realized that he had to leave the carpentry to them. They had built the thing at speed, not out of bamboo but out of wood, and in a very heavy dzong or hill fortress style, each room so varnished and painted with the traditional Tibetan colors for trim that they perched in the branches like giant toychests—rather wonderful, but not at all like the airy structures of the Disneyland masterpiece Frank had been conceptualizing. Frank wasn’t sure that he liked their version.

The overall design, however, had held. There was a grand central room, like a cottage that the biggest tree had grown through and uplifted thirty feet, so that now it hung in the middle of the copse. This circular room had an open balcony or patio all the way around it, and from this round patio several railed staircases and catwalks led over branches or across open space, out and up to smaller rooms, about a dozen of them.

Sucandra arrived and pointed out one of the lowest and outmost of the hanging rooms, on the river side of the hill: that one, he said, was to be Frank and Rudra’s. The roommates nodded solemnly; it would do. It definitely would do.

Late that day, having moved in, they looked back into the grove from their doorway and its own little balcony, and saw all the other rooms, their windows lit like lanterns in the dusk. On the inside their room was small. Even so their belongings looked rather meager, stacked in cardboard boxes in one corner. Sucandra and Padma and Qang all stood in the doorway, looking concerned. They had not believed Rudra’s assurances that the broad circular staircase and the narrow catwalk out the low branch would present no problems to him. Frank didn’t know whether to believe him either, but so far the old man had ascended and descended with only the help of the railing and some sulfurous muttering. And if problems arose, there was a kind of giant dumbwaiter or open lift next to the trunk, in which he could travel up and down. Even now they were using it to bring up their furniture—two single beds, a table and a couple of chairs, two small chests. Once all that was moved in the room looked larger than before, and more normal.

So. Here they were. Rudra sat before the window, looking down at the river. He had his laptop on the table, and he seemed content. “Very nice outlook,” he said, pointing out. “Nice to have such a view.”

“Yes,” Frank said, thinking of his treehouse in Rock Creek. Rudra would have enjoyed that. It might have been possible to lash the old man to Miss Piggy and then haul him up using the winch. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds.

But here they were. And in fact the view was much more extensive than Rock Creek’s had been. The sweep of the Potomac was now a glassy silver green, with bronze highlights under the far bank. Very nice. The expansion of space over the river, the big open band of sky over it, struck Frank with a kind of physical relief, a long ahhhhhhh. This was what you never got in the forest, this kind of open spaciousness. No wonder forest people loved their rivers—not just great roads for them, but the place of the sky and the stars!

In the days that followed, Frank woke at dawn to look out at this prospect, and saw at different times on the water highlights of yellow or rose or pink, and once it was a clean sheet of gold. These fine dawns were about the only time Frank saw the view; the rest of the day he was gone. Perhaps for that reason, he woke early, usually at first light. A mist would often be rolling over the glass, wisping up on puffs of wind. On windy mornings, waves would push upstream like a tide, although here they were above the tidal surge, and seeing only the wind chop. Sometimes it was enough to create little whitecaps, and their room would bounce and sway gently, in a way very unlike his old treehouse. There he had been on a vertical trunk, here a horizontal branch; it made a big difference.

In their new room Rudra did not talk as much as he had in Arlington. He slept a lot. But sometimes he would be sitting up in bed, humming or reading when Frank came home, or looking at his laptop screen, and then they would chat as before.

“Nice day?”

“Yes.”

“More salt in ocean?”

“Yes, precisely. What about you?”

“Oh, very nice day. Sun on water flicker so nicely. And some tantric websites, yum.”

“It’s like you’re back in Shambhala then.”

“No like. This is Shambhala.”

“So, it follows you around? It’s a kind of, what, a phase space, or a magnetic field around you, or something like that?”

“Buddhafield, I think you mean. No, Shambhala is not like that. The buddhafield is always there, yes. But that can be wherever you make one. Shambhala is a particular place. The first hidden valley. But the valley moves from time to time. We performed the ceremony that asked if it should be here. The spirits said yes.”

“Were you the, the what do you call it?”

“The voice? Oracle? No. I’m not strong enough anymore. Retired, like I told you. But Qang did well. Guru Rimpoche came to her and spoke. Khembalung is drowned for good, he said. Shambhala is now right here,” waving down at the river.

“Wow,” Frank said. As if on cue, when he looked out their window he saw the light of the rising moon, squiggling over the river in big liquid S’s. Suddenly it had a mysterious beauty.

Another time Frank was out on the river with Drepung and Charlie. They had kayaked out from the boathouse at the mouth of Rock Creek. Rock Creek where it debouched into the Potomac was still a very undistinguished little channel, raw from the great flood, all sand and sandstone and mangled trees.

On this day there was practically no downstream flow in the great river, and they were able to paddle straight across to Roosevelt Island and poke into the many little overhangs there, to look up the slope of the island park through forest. White-tailed deer, white-tailed deer; it was disturbing to Frank to see what a population boom there was in this species, a kind of epidemic. The native predators that were now returning, and the occasional exotic feral (the jaguar?) were nowhere near numerous enough to cull the flock. Big rabbits, as everyone called them. One had to remember they were wild creatures, big mammals, therefore to be loved. That vivid embrace with the doe. It was an old mistake not to value the common wildlife. They did that with people and look at the result.

So: deer; the occasional porcupine; foxes; once a bobcat; and birds. They were almost back to the old depopulate forest from the time before the flood. Frank found this depressing. He grew almost to hate the sight of the deer, as they were in some sense the cohort of humans, part of humanity’s own over-population surge. Then again, having them around beat a forest entirely empty; and from time to time he would catch a glimpse of something other. Brindled fur, striped flank, flash of color like a golden tamarind monkey; these and other brief signs of hidden life appeared. Because of the road bridges, Roosevelt Island was not really an island after all, but a sort of big wilderness peninsula. In that sense Teddy Roosevelt had the greatest D.C. monument of them all.

But on this day, as they were paddling back from the upstream tip of the island to the boathouse, Frank felt cold water gushing over his feet, thighs, and butt, all at once—catastrophic leak! “Hey!” he shouted, and then he had to hurry to wiggle out of the kayak’s skirt and into the river. It really was coming in fast. Nothing for it but to start swimming, Charlie and Drepung there by his side, full of concern, and close enough that Frank was able to hold on to Charlie’s stern end with one hand, and grasp the sunken bow of his kayak in the other, and kick to keep his position as the link between the two as Charlie dug in and paddled them back across the river to their dock. Cold but not frigid. Suddenly swimming! As if in San Diego. But the river water tasted silty.

Back on the dock they hauled Frank’s kayak up and turned it over to drain it and inspect the bottom. Up near the very front, the hull had split along the midline, gaping wide enough to let in the water that had sunk it. “Factory defect,” Frank said with quick disapproval. “Look, it split a seam. It must have been a bad melt job. I’ll have to give the kayak company some grief about a defect like that.”

“I should say so!” Charlie exclaimed. “Are you okay?”

“Sure. I’m just wet. I’ll go get a change of clothes from my car.” And Frank rolled the kayak back over, noting that neither Charlie or Drepung seemed aware that this kayak, like most, was a single cast piece of plastic, with no seam on the keel to delaminate. They took his explanation at face value, it appeared.

Which was a relief to him, as it would have been hard to find any way to explain why someone would want to melt a weakness into his kayak, a flaw that would crack under the pressure of his paddling. He was having a hard time with that himself.

He opened his van and got out a change of clothes, looking around at the interior of the van curiously, feeling more and more worried—worried and angry both. Someone trying to harass him—to intimidate him—but why? What reaction did they want to induce from him, if any? And how could he counter them without falling into that particular reaction?

Caroline’s ex—that face, sneering over the shoulder as he descended into the Metro. And Frank had thrown the hand axe at him. Suddenly the feeling came over Frank, in a wave, that he would throw it again if he had the chance. He wanted the chance. He realized he was furious and trying not to feel that. Also scared—mainly for Caroline, but for himself too. Who knew what this asshole would do?

He changed clothes in his van, made the short drive up Rock Creek Parkway to the zoo, parked off Broad Branch and walked through the green trees out to Connecticut Avenue and the Delhi Dabai. He found himself inside, seated at a corner table looking at a menu, and realized he had not decided a single move since leaving the boathouse. It had been automatic pilot; but now he had a menu to choose from, and he couldn’t. Decision trees. The automatic pilot was gone. Something hot and angry; just order the curry like always. Indigestion before he had even started eating. Off again through the early evening. The days were getting longer, the temperature balmy. Twilight spent at the overlook, checking out the salt lick at the bottom of the ravine. Big bodies in the infrared. Most were white-tailed deer, but not all. Ethiopian antelope; ibex; hedgehog. Rock Creek was still the epicenter of the feral population.

Back in his van he found the engine wouldn’t start. Startled, he cursed, jumped out, looked under the hood.

The battery cables had been cut.

He tried to collect his thoughts. He looked up and down the dark streets. The van had been parked more or less at random, and locked. No way to get the hood up without getting inside the van; no way of getting into the van without a key. Well, dealers had master keys. Presumably spooks did too.

This must mean that Edward Cooper knew who he was. Knew that he was Caroline’s helper, and no doubt presumed to be more; the man who had thrown a rock at his head, etc. Had him chipped or at least his van.

The hair on the back of Frank’s neck prickled. His feet were cold. He looked around casually as he called AAA on his FOG phone and waited for a tow. When the guy in the tow truck took a look under the hood, he said “Ha.” He took out his toolbox, installed a replacement cable. Frank thanked him, signed, got in the driver’s seat; the engine coughed and started. Back out to the Khembalis’ farm. He didn’t know what else to do.

That night as he turned the matter over in his mind, he began to get both angrier and more frightened. If they had found him, did that mean they had found Caroline too? And if so what would they do? Where would they stop? What was their point?

And where was Caroline?

He had to talk to Edgardo again.

So he did, out on their lunch run the very next day. They ran down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial. It was a good running route, almost like a track: two miles from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, on grass or decomposed granite all the way. There were other runners in the White House compound, and sometimes they went out with some OMB guys, but Edgardo and Frank now usually ran by themselves. It wasn’t the same without Kenzo and Bob and the others, but it was what they had, and it gave them the chance to talk.

They had run a chip wand over each other before taking off, and after they got going Frank described what was happening.

“My computer crash could have been them too. Maybe they were erasing signs that they had broken into my system.”

“Maybe,” Edgardo was shaking his head back and forth like Stevie Wonder, his lips pursed unhappily. “I agree, if they are the ones vandalizing your stuff, then they must have found out you’re the one who helped Caroline get away. But I’m wondering how they did that, if they did.”

“And if they’ve managed to relocate Caroline as well.”

“That doesn’t follow,” Edgardo pointed out. “You’re not trying to hide, and she is.”

“I know. I’m just wondering. I’m worried. Because I don’t know how they found me.”

They pounded on a few paces thinking about it.

“Do you have no way of getting in contact with her?”

“No.”

“You need that. That should be a normal part of the repertory. Next time she contacts you, you have to tell her you need a dead drop, or a dedicated cell phone, or some other way to get in touch with her.”

“I said that up on Mount Desert Island, believe me.”

“She was reluctant?”

“I guess. She said she would get in touch with me. But that was four months ago.”

“Hmm.”

More running. Now they had been out long enough that Frank had begun to sweat.

Edgardo said, “I wonder. You said she said she is surveiling her ex. So I wonder if you can use that surveillance of hers, and tap into it to get a message to her.”

“Like…pin a message to his door, and hope she’ll see it and read it on camera before he gets home?”

“Well, something like that. You could show up at his doorstep, hold up a sign, then off you go. Your gal can stop her video, if she’s got one there, and read what you’ve said.”

“What if he’s got a camera on his place too?”

“Well, yes, but would he watch himself like that? I’m not sure too many people take things that far.”

“I guess not. Anyway it’s an idea. Even if he saw it too, he wouldn’t know any more than he did before. I’ll think about it.”

“Good. You might also go back up and check that place in Maine, especially if nothing else works. If she liked it as much as she said she did, maybe she’s gone back there, or stayed all along. Sometimes being close to where you were, but not too close, is the best place to hide.”

“Interesting,” Frank said. “I’d have to be sure not to lead him back to her though.”

“Yes.”

A few more strides. Frank shook his head, snorted unhappily. “It’s too complicated, this surveillance stuff. I hate it. I just want to be able to call her.”

“You need a dead drop system. They’re easy to set up, even within the current tech.”

“Yeah, but I need to find her first.”

“Yeah yeah. You need to change vans too, if that’s really how they followed you north. My friend still doesn’t believe that.”

“Yeah well they just found it again. I should get rid of it.”

“Wait till you need to get clear, then buy an old one for cash. Or just go without a car.”

“I need a car! I need a van, actually. God damn it.”

“Let’s just run. That’s all the going round and round we need right now.”

“Okay. Sorry. Thanks.”

“No problem. We will figure something out and prevail. The world and your love life deserve no less.”

“Shit.”

“Did you schedule a time for that nasal surgery yet?”

“No! Let’s just run!”

-

THE FEELING OF HELPLESSNESS and indecision grew in him until he couldn’t sleep at night. You had to decide to sleep a night through. In one of the long cold insomniac hours, listening unhappily to Rudra’s uneven snore, he realized he had to do something about finding Caroline, no matter how futile it might be, just to give himself some small release from the anxiety of the situation. So the next night, after Rudra fell asleep, he drove to Bethesda, and at three a.m. parked and got out, and walked quickly up the empty streets to the apartment building that Caroline and her ex had lived in before her disappearance.

All empty. Streetlight across the street from the building; a dim doorway light illuminating the steps of the building. If Caroline had the place under surveillance then she would presumably have some kind of motion sensor on her camera or her data. If she saw him in that doorway, she would know that he wanted her to contact him. He was afraid that there might also be a security camera of some kind on the building, perhaps monitored by Caroline’s ex. It would make sense, if you were in that line of work and thinking along those lines. Well, shit. She definitely was surveiling the building, her ex only possibly. It had to be tried.

He walked deliberately up to the steps of the place, looked at the address panel as if seeking a name. Shaking his head slightly, he looked out at the street and the buildings across the street, said “call me,” feeling awkward. Then off again into the night. Lots of people had to come to that door, and some would be lost, or just looking randomly at things. It was the best he could do. He couldn’t decide whether it was adequate or not. When he tried to figure out what to do he felt sick to his stomach.

He went to work the next day wondering if she would see him. Wondering where she was and what she was thinking. Wondering how she could stay away from him so long. He wouldn’t have done it to her.

At work they were getting things done while still settling into the Old Executive Offices. Diane and the others were obviously pleased to be there. It still amazed Frank that physical proximity mattered in questions of influence and power within the executive branch. It was as clear a sign of their primate nature as any he could think of, as it made no sense given current technology. But some previous president had kicked his science advisor out of the Old Executive Offices, and so Phil Chase’s immediate order that it return to the fourth floor of the old monstrosity, and take up one whole wing, had been an excellent sign. And there was even a practical sense in which it was useful, in that once inside the security barrier of the White House compound they were free to walk next door any time they wanted, to consult in person with the president’s various staffers, or even with the man himself, if it should come to that.

Their new building was officially named after Eisenhower, but in practice always referred to by its older name, the Old Executive Offices. It was spectacularly ugly on the outside, disfigured by many pairs of nonfunctional pillars, some rising from ground level to the third floor, others filling embrasures on the upper stories, and all blackened as if by one of London’s coal smogs. Frank had never seen anything like it.

Inside it was merely a very old musty office complex, retrofitted for modern conveniences a few too many years before, and otherwise about as moldy and dim as the outside of the hulk might suggest. In physical terms it was a real step down for those coming from the light-filled tower that NSF occupied in Arlington, but the political coup for science meant no complaints. All they really needed were rooms with electrical outlets and high-speed internet access, and these they had. And it had to be admitted that it was an interesting thing to look out one’s window and see the business side of the White House right there across a little concrete gap. The seat of power itself; and thus a sign that Phil Chase understood the importance of science in their current crisis. Which was an encouragement to them to throw themselves into things even more intently than before.

So, at least, Diane seemed to take it. She had commandeered one of the offices with a window facing the White House, and set her desk in such a way that she saw it when she looked to her right. She did not actually see Phil Chase, he was so busy, but he sent e-mail questions on a regular basis, and Charlie Quibler and the rest of his staffers concerned with environmental questions were always dropping by.

Her main conference room was across the hall from her office, and as soon as it was properly outfitted, she convened the climate group to discuss their next moves.

Frank took notes doggedly, trying to stay focused. It looked like the Arctic ice would not break up this summer, which would set a base for an even thicker layer next winter. This meant that the northern extension of the Gulf Stream would probably be salty for the next few seasons, which meant the Gulf Stream’s petawatt per year of heat would again be transferred twenty degrees of latitude north, and this in turn would bring heat back to the Arctic, and contribute again to the ongoing overall warming that despite the harsh winters in the eastern half of North America and in Europe was still dominating world weather. To Frank it was beginning to look like a lose-lose situation, in that no matter what they did, things were likely to degrade. It was a war of feedback loops, and very difficult to model. Kenzo pointed to the graphs on his last slide and simply shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows. There are too many factors in play now. Cloud action by itself is enough to confound most of the models. The one thing I can say for sure is that we need to reduce carbon emissions as soon as possible. We’re in damage control mode at best, until we get to clean energy and transport. The sea water pH change alone is a huge problem, because if the ocean food chain collapses because of that, well, then…”

“Can that danger be quantified?” Diane asked.

“Sure, they are trying. Lots of the finest seashells are dissolved by what we’re seeing already, but it may be that more resilient ones will bloom to fill the niche. So we have some parameters, but it’s all pretty loose. What’s clear is that if the plankton and the coral reefs both die, the oceans could go catastrophic. A major mass extinction, and there’s no recovering from that. Not in less than several million years.”

Unlike his pronouncements on the weather, Kenzo exhibited none of his usual happy air, of an impresario with a particularly spectacular circus. This stuff could not possibly be interpreted as some kind of fun, too-interesting-to-be-lamented event; this was simply bad, even dire. To see Kenzo actually being grave startled Frank, even frightened him. Kenzo Hayakawa, making a dire warning? Could there be a worse sign?

And yet there were ongoing matters to attend to, new things to try. The springtime reports from Siberia indicated that the altered lichens the Russians had released the previous summer were continuing to grow faster than predicted. “Like pond scum,” as one of the Russian scientists reported. This was very unlike the pace of growth and dispersion for ordinary lichens, and seemed to confirm the suggestion that the bioengineered version was behaving more like an algae or a fungus than like the symbiosis of the two typically did. That was interesting, perhaps ominous; Kenzo thought it could cause a major carbon drawdown from the atmosphere if it continued. “Unless it kills the whole Siberian forest, and then who knows? Maybe instead of gray goo, we die by green goo, eh?”

“Please, Kenzo.”

On other fronts the news was just as ambiguous. Vicious infighting at the Department of Energy, the nuclear folks still doing their best to forestall the alternatives crowd; Diane was trying to convince the president to order Energy to develop clean energy ASAP—first finding bridge technologies, moving away from what they had now while still using it—then the next real thing, the next iteration on the way to a completely sustainable technology. Diane thought it would take two or three major iterations. Lots of federal agencies would have to be entrained to this effort, of course, but DOE was crucial, given that energy was at the heart of their problem. But all this would depend on who Phil appointed to be the new Energy Secretary. If that person were on board with the program, off they would all go; if opposed, more war of the agencies. One could only hope that Phil would not tie down his people in such a self-defeating way. But campaign debts were owed, and Big Oil had a lot of people still in positions of great power. And Phil had not yet appointed his Energy Secretary.

After a meeting running over the list of possible candidates for this crucial cabinet position, Diane came by Frank’s new office, which had no living-room feel whatsoever—in fact it looked like he had been condemned to clerk in some bureaucratic hell, right next to Bob Cratchit or Bartelby the Scrivener.

Even Diane seemed to notice this, to the point of saying “It’s a pretty weird old facility.”

“Yes. I don’t think I’ll ever like it like I did NSF.”

“That turned out pretty well, in terms of the building. Although that too was a political exile.”

“So Anna told me.”

“Want to go out and hunt for a new coffee place?”

“Sure.”

Frank got his windbreaker from its hook and they left the building and then the compound. Just south of the White House was the Ellipse, and then the Washington Monument, towering over the scene like an enormous sundial on an English lawn. The buildings around the White House included the Treasury, the World Bank, and any number of other massive white buildings, filling the blocks so that every street was as if walled. These big expanses of granite and concrete and marble were very bad in human terms; even Arlington was better.

But there were many coffee shops and delis tucked into the ground floor spaces, and so the two of them hiked around in an oblong pattern, looking at the possibilities and chatting. Nothing looked appealing, and finally Diane suggested one of the little National Park tourist kiosks out on the Mall itself. They were already east of the White House, and when they came out on the great open expanse into the low sun they could see much of official Washington, with the Capitol and the Washington Monument towering over everything else. That was the dominant impression Frank had of downtown at this point; the feel of it was determined principally by the height limit, which held all private buildings to a maximum of twelve stories, well under the height of the Washington Monument. The downtown was as if sheered off by a knife at that height, an unusual sight in a modern city, giving it a strangely nineteenth-century look, as for instance Paris right before the arrival of the Eiffel Tower. Once away from the federal district, this invisible ceiling gave things a more human scale than the skyscraper downtowns of other cities, and Frank liked that quality, even though the result was squat or unwieldy.

Diane nodded as he tried to express these mixed feelings. She pointed out the lion statues surrounding Ulysses S. Grant in front of the Capitol: “See, they’re Disney lions!”

“Like the ones on the Connecticut Avenue bridge.”

“I wonder which came first, Disney or these guys?”

“These must have, right?”

“I don’t know. Disney lions have looked the same at least since Dumbo.”

“Maybe Disney came here and saw these.”

Within a week or so they had worked up a new traditional walk together. One afternoon as they drank their coffee, Diane suggested they return to work by way of a pass through the National Gallery annex; and there they found a Frederic Church exhibit. “Hey!” Frank said, and then had to lie a little bit, explaining that he had learned about Church on Mount Desert Island, long ago. As they walked through he remembered his intense time on the island, which he now saw through the eyes of the painter who had invented rusticating. His paintings were superb, far better than Bierstadt or Homer or any other American landscape artist Frank had ever seen. Church had been able to put an almost photorealist technique in the service of a Transcendentalist eye; it was the visionary, sacred landscape of Emerson and Thoreau, right there on the walls of the National Gallery. “My God,” Frank said more than once. This was also the time of Darwin and Humboldt; indeed the wall-sized “Heart of the Andes,” fifteen feet high and twenty wide, stood there like some stupendous PowerPoint slide illustrating all of natural selection at once, both data and theory.

“My—God.”

“It’s like the IMAX movie of its time,” Diane said.

In the rooms beyond they saw Church travel and grow old, and become almost hallucinogenic in his coloring, like Galen Rowell after he discovered Fujichrome. These were the best landscape paintings Frank had ever seen. A giant close-up of the water leaping off the lip of Niagara Falls; the Parthenon at sunset; waves striking the Maine coast; every scene leaped off the wall, and Frank goggled at them. Diane laughed at him, but he could not restrain himself. How had he never been exposed to such an artist as this? What was American education anyway, that they could all grow up and not be steeped in Emerson and Thoreau and Audubon and Church? It was like inheriting billions and then forgetting it.

Then Diane put her hand to his arm and directed him out of the gallery and back toward their new office. Back into the blackened old building, if not arm in arm, then shoulder to shoulder.

Their meeting that evening had to do with the latest from Antarctica, compiled by NSF’s Antarctic division from the austral summer just past.

Much of the research had been devoted to trying to determine how much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might come off, and how fast it would happen. The abstract of the summary made it clear that the several big ice streams that ran like immense glaciers through more stationary parts of the ice sheet had accelerated yet again, beyond even the earlier two accelerations documented in previous decades. The first acceleration had followed the rapid detachment of the two big floating ice shelves, the Ross and the Weddell. Their absence had destabilized the grounding line of the WAIS, which rested on land that was a bit below sea level, and so was susceptible at the edges to the lifting of tides and tearing of currents. As the ice margins tore away and followed the ice shelves out to sea, that exposed more grounded ice to the same tides and currents.

What they had found this last summer was that all Antarctic temperatures, in air, water, and ice, had risen, and this was allowing melt water on the surface of the WAIS to run down holes and cracks, where it froze and split the ice around it further. When this “water wedging” reached all the way through the ice it poured down and pooled underneath, thus floating the broken ice a bit and lubricating its slide into the sea.

Why the ice streams moved so much faster than the surrounding ice was still not fully understood, but some were now postulating under-ice watersheds, where melt water was flowing downstream, carrying the ice over it along. This would explain why the ice streams were now acting more like rivers than glaciers. There were different hydrodynamics resulting in different speeds.

Diane interrupted the two glaciologists making the report before they got too deep into the mysteries of their calling. “So what kind of sea-level rise are we looking at?” she asked. “How much, and when?”

The glaciologists and the NOAA people looked around at each other, then made a kind of collective shrug. Frank grinned to see it.

“It’s difficult to say,” one finally ventured. “It depends so much on stuff we don’t know.”

“Give me parameters then, and your best bets.”

“Well, I don’t know, I’m definitely getting out of my comfort zone here, but I’d say as much as half of the ice sheet could detach in the next several years. That would be down the middle on the Ross Sea side, where there’s a big trough under Ice Stream B. All that could flood and the ice get tugged away. Here, and here,” red-lighting the map like a kid waving a penlight, “are under-ice ranges connecting the Peninsular Range and the Transantarctics, and those create catchment basins which will probably anchor a good bit of these regions,” making big red circles. Having made his ignorance disclaimer, he was now carving the map like a geography teacher. Diane ignored this discrepancy, as did everyone else; it was understood that they were now guessing, and that his red circles were not data, but rather him thinking aloud.

“So—that implies what, a couple-few meters of sea-level rise?”

“A couple.”

“So, okay. That’s pretty bad. Time scales, again?”

“Hard to say? Maybe—if these rates hold—thirty years? Fifty?”

“Okay. Well…” Diane looked around the room. “Any thoughts?”

“We can’t afford a sea-level rise that high.”

“Better get used to it! It’s not like we can stop it.”

They turned with renewed interest to Frank’s suggestion of flooding the world’s desertified lake basins. The discussion went over the parts of an informal NSF study which suggested that big salt lakes would indeed cause clouds and precipitation downwind, so that watersheds to the east would receive more water. Local weather patterns would change with the general rise in humidity, but as they were changing anyway, the changes might be hard to distinguish from the background. Ultimate effects impossible to predict. Frank noted how many studies were coming to that conclusion. Like all of them, when it came to weather. It was like nerve damage.

They looked at each other. Maybe, someone suggested, if that’s what it takes to save the seacoasts from flooding, the global community would compensate the new lakes’ host nations for whatever environmental damage was assessed. Possibly a sea water market could be established along with the carbon market; possibly they could be linked. Surely the most prosperous quarter of humanity could find ways to compensate the people, often poor, who would be negatively impacted by the creation of these reservoirs.

Frank said, “We’ve tried some back-of-the-envelope numbers, estimating the capital worth of the major port cities and other coastal development, and got figures like five hundred trillion dollars.”

General Wracke, an active member of Diane’s advisory group, put his hands together reverently. “A half a quadrillion dollars,” he said, grinning. “That’s a lot of construction funding.”

“Yes. On the other hand, for comparison purposes, the infrastructural value of property in the superdry basins of Africa, Asia, and the American basin and range comes to well under ten billion, unless you throw in Salt Lake City, which actually has a legal limit on the books as to how high the Great Salt Lake is allowed to rise, that isn’t much higher than it is now. Anyway, in global terms, statistically, there’s nothing out there in those basins. Statistically insignificant populations to displace, possibility of building new settlements by new water. Local weather deranged, but it is already. So…”

The general nodded and asked about pumping water back up onto the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet, which was very high and stable. Some of the NSF report was devoted to this question. The pumped sea water would freeze and then sit unconformably as a kind of salty ice cap on the fresh ice cap. Every cubic kilometer of sea water placed up there would reduce sea level by that same amount, without the radical changes implied by creating new salt seas all across the thirties north and south. Could only pump half of the year using solar power.

The energy requirements needed to enact the lift and transfer remained a stumbling block; they would have to build many powerful clean energy systems. But they had to do that anyway, as several of them pointed out. The easy oil would soon be gone, and burning the oil and coal that was left would cook the world. So if some combination of sunlight, wind, wave, tide, currents, nuclear, and geothermal power could be harnessed, this would not only replace the burning of fossil fuels, which was imperative anyway, but possibly save sea level as well.

Some there advocated nuclear for the power they needed, others called for fusion. But others held fast for the clean renewables. The advocates of tidal power asserted that new technologies were already available and ready to be ramped up, technologies almost as simple as Archimedes’ screw in concept, relying on turbines and pumps made of glassy metals that would be impervious to sea water corrosion. Anchor these units in place and the ocean would flow through them and power would be generated. It was only a matter of making the necessary investment and they would be there.

“But where’s the money going to come from?” someone asked.

“The military budgets of the world equal about a trillion dollars a year,” Frank noted, “half of that coming from the United States. Maybe we can’t afford to throw that work away anymore. Maybe the money could be reallocated. And we do need a really big manufacturing capacity here. What if the entire military-industrial complex, funded by these enormous budgets, were redirected to the projects we are outlining? How long would it take for the global effects to be measurable?”

Dream on, someone muttered.

Others thought it over, or punched numbers into their handhelds, testing out possibilities. Of course redirecting the military budgets of the world was “unrealistic.” But it was worth bringing it up, Frank judged, to suggest the size of the world’s industrial capacity. What could be done if humanity were not trapped in its own institutions? “To wrest Freedom from the grasp of Necessity,” Frank said. “Who said that?”

People in the meeting were beginning to look at him strangely again. Dream on, oh desperate fool, their looks said. But it wasn’t just him who was desperate.

“You’re beginning to sound like the Khembalis,” Anna said. But she liked that, she was pleased by that. And if Anna approved, Frank felt he must in some sense be on the right track.

By the time they were done with that meeting it was late, the wind barreling through the empty streets of the federal district.

“What about dinner?” Diane said to Frank when they had a moment in private, and Frank nodded. She said, “I still don’t know any restaurants around here, but we can look.”

“Maybe over toward the Capitol. For some reason the whole area around George Washington University is pretty dead this late at night, I don’t know why.”

“Let’s see what we find.”

And off they went, on another date in the nation’s capital.

It was a fun date. They found a Greek restaurant, and sat across a little table and talked over the meeting and the day and everything else. Frank drank a glass of retsina, a glass of ouzo, and a cup of Greek coffee, all while wolfing down dolmades, sliced octopus arms in oil, and moussaka. He laughed a lot. Looking across the table at Diane’s round face, so vivacious and intelligent, so charismatic and powerful, he thought: I love this woman.

He could not think about the feeling. He shied away from the thought and just felt it. Everything else at the moment was unreal, or at least nonpresent. He focused on the present in the way Rudra was always encouraging him to do. The advantages of such a focus were evident in a certain calmness that spread through him, a feeling that might have been happiness. Or maybe it was the food, the alcohol, the caffeine. The tastes and looks and sounds. Her face. Were those what happiness consisted of? A smile, a glance, as the old man had said—what ample borrowers of eternity they are!

Afterward they walked back to the compound, and Frank walked her to her car in the underground parking lot.

“Good night, that was nice.”

“Yes it was.” She looked up and Frank leaned over, their lips met in a perfect little kiss, and off he went.

He drove to the Khembali farm with his heart all aflutter. He didn’t know what he thought. Rudra was asleep and he was glad, and then sorry. He tried to sleep and could not sleep. Finally he sat up and turned on his laptop.

Thoreau was a solitary. He fell in love with his brother’s girlfriend, and proposed to her after his brother had proposed to her and been turned down. Henry too was turned down. There were rumors the girl’s father did not think the Thoreaus were good enough. But if she had insisted…Anyway Henry became a solitary. “There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.”

That night the website had something from his journal:

From his journal, March 23, 1856; he had been thirty-eight years old. What would he think now, after another century and a half of destruction and loss? Maybe he would not have been surprised. He had seen it already started. Frank groaned.

“What wrong?”

“Oh nothing. Sorry I woke you.”

“I was not sleeping. I don’t sleep much.”

“You sounded like you were sleeping.”

“No.”

“Maybe you were dreaming.”

“No. What wrong?”

“I was thinking about all the animals that are in trouble. In danger of extinction. Thoreau was writing about the predators being wiped out.”

“Ah well. You still see animals in park?”

“Yes, but mostly just deer now.”

“Ah well.”

Rudra fell back asleep. After a while Frank drifted into uneasy dreams. Then he was awake again and thinking about Diane. He wasn’t going to fall asleep; it was four. He got up and made his way out of the treehouse and across the farm to his van. Back into the city, down Connecticut from the already-crowded Beltway. Left on Brandywine, park on Linnean, get out and cross Broad Branch, and thus out into Rock Creek Park.

He hiked around the rim of the new gorge, and saw nothing but a single deer. He hiked up to Fort de Russey, back down on the eastern wild way, and saw nothing but a trio of deer, standing upslope like wary statues. He decided as he watched them that he would be the predator—that he would scare these creatures, and at the same time test his ability, and see how long he could keep them in sight, not as a stalker, but a predator in pursuit. He set the timer on his wristwatch to zero, clicked it and took off after them, up the open forest floor with its black soil underfoot, sprinting hard. They bolted over the nearest ridge, he flew up to it—no deer to be seen! Empty forest! But where had they—he stopped his watch. 4.82 seconds. He barked a laugh and stood there for a while, panting.

When he started walking again he headed toward Site 21, to see if the guys were there and check in with his treehouse.

Except from a distance he saw that something was wrong with it. He ran to it, trying to understand the gap in the air. When he got to it he saw it had been cut down.

He inspected the trunk. Cut by a chain saw, a smallish one it seemed by the sweep of the cut marks. The tree had fallen across Rock Creek; you could have used the trunk as a bridge over the stream. Maybe someone had needed a bridge. But no. You could cross the creek almost anywhere.

The treehouse itself was part of the wreckage on the other bank. At some point last year he had removed all of his gear except for the winch.

He crossed the creek on his boulder path, took a look; the winch was now gone. Only the plywood sheets and two-by-fours were left, all now horribly askew, with some of the plywood loose on the ground.

He sat down next to these fragments. They were just sticks. He was never going to have lived in this treehouse again. So it didn’t matter.

Edward Cooper had probably done this, or had it done. Of course it might have been total strangers, looking to scavenge whatever the treehouse might have held, like for instance the winch. Surely this Cooper would have left the winch as part of his revenge, as mockery. But maybe not. He didn’t really know. There seemed to be a pattern—computer, kayak, van. His stuff and his life. It looked like deliberate action.

He didn’t know what to do.

-

ONE SATURDAY THE QUIBLERS got to a project they had been planning for some time, which was the installation of garden beds in the backyard. No more suburban lawn wasting their yard space!

And indeed it was a great pleasure to Charlie to cut big rectangles of turf out of the backyard and wheelbarrow these out to the street for disposal by the composting trucks. He was sick of mowing that yard. There was some old lumber stacked at the back of the garage, and now he and Nick laid lengths of it down in the remaining lawn to serve as borders. Then they transferred many wheelbarrow loads of expensive amended soil from the pile in the driveway where the dump trunk had left it, around the house to the rectangles, dodging Joe at many points along the way. The resulting raised beds were loamy and black and looked highly productive and artificial. The grass in between the beds was going to be difficult to cut, Charlie realized, and he envisioned transitioning entirely to mulch between the beds as the seasons went by, leaving only a decorative border of grass around the beds.

Nick and Anna were now working the soil in, and planting their first vegetables. It was full spring now, middle of May, steamy and green, and so they planted the usual summer vegetables: tomatoes, zucchini, strawberries, peppers, pumpkins, melons, basil, eggplant, cilantro, cucumbers.

Nick stood looking down at a broccoli plant, small and delicate between his feet. “So where will the broccoli come out?” he asked Charlie.

Charlie stared at the plant. It looked like an ornamental. “I don’t know,” he confessed, feeling a little stab of fear. They didn’t know anything.

Nick rolled his eyes. “Well, if we’re lucky they won’t show up at all.”

“Come on now. Broccoli is good for you.”

One of their agreements was that they would plant vegetables that Nick and Joe liked to eat, which was a severe constraint, but one they had agreed to, because it was not exclusive; they were planting for Anna and Charlie too. But for the boys it was mostly down to potatoes, an entire bed of them, and carrots. Joe would eat some other vegetables, but Nick would not, and so he was put in charge of the carrot bed. These were to be planted from seed, and apparently the soil had to be specially amended. Sandy soil was best, and white cloth laid over the soil during the germination was recommended—by Drepung, anyway, who was serving as their consultant on this project.

“Although it shouldn’t be me,” he kept saying, “I don’t know anything about gardening really, it’s all Qang at our place, you should have her over to do things like plant carrot seed. I think that one is tricky. She would do a fire puja and everything.”

Still, he helped them to get it planted and covered, on his hands and knees digging happily, and showing worms to Joe. After the planting it was mostly a matter of watering and weeding. Also removing snails and slugs. Joe carried these carefully to the back of their lot, where they could start life over in the weeds bordering the lawn.

“Don’t overwater,” Charlie advised Nick. “You don’t want to drown things in their beds. You have to be precise in how much you water them. I estimate about say this much, if you want to be accurate.”

“Do you mean accurate or precise?” Anna asked from the new flower bed.

“No quibbling allowed.”

“I’m not quibbling! It’s an important distinction.”

“Hello, what do you mean? Accurate and precise mean the precisely same thing!”

“They do not.”

“What do you mean,” Charlie was giggling at her now, “how so?”

“Accuracy,” she said, “means how close an estimate is to the true value. So if you estimate something is five percent and it turns out to be eight percent, then you weren’t very accurate.”

“This is statistics.”

“Yes, it is. And precision refers to how broad your estimate is. Like, if you estimate something is between five and eight percent, then you aren’t being very precise, but if you say a range is between 4.9 and 5.1 percent, then it’s a more precise estimate.”

“I see,” Charlie said, nodding solemnly.

“Quit it! It’s a very important distinction!”

“Of course it is. I wasn’t laughing at that.”

“At what then?”

“At you!”

“But why?”

“Oh, no reason.”

“It is a real distinction,” Nick pointed out to Charlie.

“Oh of course, of course!”

So this then became one of the recurrent motifs of the Quiblers on patrol, a distinction applicable, once you agreed it existed, to an amazing number of situations. Cell-phone call to fine-tune the grocery list, with one of them in the store and one at home; get some potatoes. How many? Get about half a dozen potatoes. Was that being accurate or precise? Or when someone was remarking that Nick was a very precise person, Charlie quipped, “He’s not precise, he’s accurate.” And so on.

On the way back to the garden-supply store, to get more plants and stakes and other supplies, Charlie said, “I wonder how many cubic feet of compost we need if we want to cover all four of the beds, let’s see, they’re six by twelve, say a foot deep in compost, make it simple….”

“Mom can tell you.”

“No that’s all right, I’m working on it—”

“Two hundred and eighty-eight cubic feet,” Anna said, while driving.

“I told you she would.”

“It isn’t fair,” Charlie said, still looking at his fingers. “She uses all these tricks from when she was in math club.”

“Come on,” Anna said.

Nick was helpless with laughter. “Yeah, right, Dad—she uses all these clever fiendish tricks—like multiplication,” and he and Anna laughed all the way to the store.

Unfortunately their new spring quickly became the hottest and driest on record in the Potomac watershed, and soon, it having been a dry winter on the whole, the region had to resort to water rationing. Between that and the mosquitoes, everyone began to reminisce with affection about the long winter, and wonder if it had been such a good idea to restart the Gulf Stream, since cold winters were so much preferable to drought. Crops were dying, the rivers falling low, streams drying out entirely, fish populations dying with them; it was bad. A bit of snow and cold temperatures would have been easy in comparison. You could always throw on more clothes when it got cold, but in this heat!

But of course now they didn’t have a choice.

The Quiblers did what they could to micro-irrigate their crops, and they had enough water to water such a small garden; but many of the plants died anyway. “We’re only going to have about a fifty percent survival rate, if that!”

“Is that being accurate or being precise?”

“I hope neither!”

Anna was going to websites like safeclimate.net or fightglobalwarming.com and comparing how they rated when she entered their household statistics on a carbon-burning chart. She was interested in the different methods they were using. Some accepted general descriptions as answers, others wanted the figures from your heating and electric bill, your car’s odometer and its real miles per gallon. Your actual air travel miles; charts of distances between major flying destinations were given. “The air travel is killer,” Anna muttered. “I thought it was a really energy-efficient way to travel.”

Giving her numbers to play with was like giving catnip to the cats, and Charlie watched her affectionately, but with a little bit of worry, as she speed-typed around on a spreadsheet she had adapted from the chart. Despite their garden’s contribution to their food supply, which she estimated at less than two percent of their caloric intake, and the flex schedule for power that they had signed up for with their power provider, still they were burning about 75 metric tons of carbon a year. Equivalent to eight football fields of Brazilian rain forest, the site said. Per year.

“You just can’t get a good number in a suburban home with a car and all,” she said, annoyed. “And if you fly at all.”

“It’s true.” Charlie stared over her shoulder at her spreadsheet. “I don’t see what else we can do here either, given the infrastructure.”

“I know. But I wish there was a way. Nick! Turn that light off, please!”

“Mom, you’re the one who told me to turn it on.”

“That’s when you were using it. Now you’re not.”

“Mom.”