Fifty Degrees Below

“Look,” he said abruptly, as if cutting her off in the middle of a rant, “I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey. You don’t sound sorry.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  Frank pursed his lips, tried to achieve a level tone. It was a fair enough question after all.

  “I’m sorry I borrowed money on the house without telling you about it. I owe you some money because of that.”

  “You owe me more than that.”

  Frank shrugged. “Maybe so. But I figure I owe you about $18,400 on the house deal.” He was surprised how readily the figure came to mind. “I can at least pay you back the money. What you put into the place.”

  While they had been together, their financial arrangement had been informal; a mess, in fact. And so when they broke up, which had come as a surprise to Frank, the money situation had caused big trouble. It had not been entirely Frank’s fault, or so he told himself. At the time they bought a house together in Cardiff, Marta had been in some sort of bankruptcy snarl with her soon-to-be ex-husband. She had married an ex-professor of hers, very foolishly as it had always seemed to Frank, and after the first year they had lived apart, but Marta had not bothered to get an official divorce until it became necessary. All this should have told Frank something, but it hadn’t. Marta was therefore bogged in her ex’s financial disasters, which had gone on for years—making her extra-intolerant of any funny business, as Frank only realized later, when his own affairs had gotten snarled in their turn. His had not been as bad as her ex’s, but on the other hand, there were aspects that were maybe worse, as her ex had gotten into his trouble mostly after he and Marta had split up, whereas Frank had deliberately concealed from her a third mortgage on their house, a mortgage he had taken to give him money to invest in a biotech start-up coming out of UCSD. This start-up had sparked his interest but unfortunately no one else’s, and soon the money from the third mortgage was gone, sucking all the equity they had accrued out of the place with it. So it was a really bad time for Marta to move out and demand that they sell the place and split the proceeds. He had had no time to put back the money, and when he confessed to her that there were no proceeds to split—that the money she had paid into the place, a matter of many thousands, was not there—she had freaked out. First she screamed at him, indeed threw a lamp at him; then she had refused to speak to him, or, later, to negotiate a payment schedule by which he could pay her back. At that point, it seemed to Frank, she actually wanted him to have ripped her off, the better to feel angry at him. Which no doubt helped her to avoid admitting to herself, or anyone else, that it was her wildness—specifically her sexual escapades, always “a part of the deal” of being with her, as she claimed, but increasingly upsetting—that had caused him to demand a different basis to the relationship, which had then started the whole breakup in the first place. In other words it had actually been all her fault, but with the money situation she didn’t have to admit it.

  He could only hope she knew this. She had to know it; and probably she felt some guilt or responsibility, which helped to make her so abrasive and hostile. She had cheated on him, and he had cheated her. Love and money. Ah well. The pointless wars of the heart.

  “Why did you do it?” she burst out.

  “Do what?”

  “Why did you take out a third on our house without telling me? Why didn’t you just talk about it? I would have been up for it.”

  Well, he owed her an explanation for this. “I don’t know. I didn’t think you would be up for it.”

  “Well either I would or I wouldn’t, but since you lost it all, because it was a bad idea, maybe if I hadn’t gone for it, it would have been for a good reason! I’m not stupid you know.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t know! You think I’m just a lab tech. You think I’m the surfer slut who kills the mice and makes the coffee—”

  “I do not! No way!”

  “Fucking right no way.” She glowered viciously. She hated killing lab mice. “I’ve got my own lab here, and the stuff we’re doing with Yann is really interesting. You’d be amazed.”

  “No I wouldn’t.”

  “Yes you would! You have no idea.”

  “You’re making a carbon sink organism. You told me. A way to sequester carbon quickly by biotechnical means.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s great. But you know,” Frank said carefully, “much as we need a quick carbon capture these days, your customers are going to have to be governments. Corporations aren’t going to pay for it, or be able to get the permits. It’s the U.S. government or the UN or something like that who will.”

  She glowered less viciously. “So?”

  “So, you’ll need to get government approvals, government funding—”

  “It’s no different than the drug stuff.”

  “Except for the customer. It won’t be individuals, if I understand you right. It can’t be. So it’s not like drugs at all.”

  “Not that part. We know that.”

  “So, well, you know, you’ve got to have some government agencies on your side. DOE, EPA, OMB, Congress, the White House—they’ll all have to be on board with it.”

  She waved all that away. “We’re talking to the Russians.”

  This was news to Frank, and interesting, but he ignored it for the moment and said, “But if you had NSF behind you, you’d be set to get the rest of the U.S. government behind you too.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I’m working on this stuff. I’m saying there’s a committee at NSF that’s working with two billion dollars in this year’s budget alone.”

  There. He had said it.

  She was determined not to be impressed. “So?”

  “So, that’s two billion dollars more than Small Delivery Systems has.”

  She cracked up despite herself. “You’re headhunting me. Or rather, you’re headhunting Yann.”

  “I am. You and Yann and Eleanor, and whoever else is working on this.”

  She stared at him.

  “You and Yann could stay together,” he heard himself saying. “Maybe the institute could be paired somehow with UCSD, and you two could move back to San Diego.”

  She was frowning. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know. You wouldn’t end up with job offers in different places. That happens to couples all the time, you know it does. And you guys probably aren’t done moving.”

  She laughed abruptly. “We’re not a couple either.”

  “What?”

  “You are so stupid, Frank.”

  “What do you mean.”

  “Yann is gay. We’re just friends. We share a house here. We share a lot more than you and I ever did. We talk instead of fight and fuck. It’s very nice. He’s a really good guy. But he has his boyfriends, and I have mine.”

  “Oh.”

  She laughed again, unamused. “You are such a . . .”

  She couldn’t think of a word that fit. Frank couldn’t either. He waited, staring down at the battered wooden table top. He was such a—a what? A something. Really, there was no word that came to mind. A fool? A mess?

  Was he any more of a mess than anyone else, though?

  Maybe so.

  He shrugged. “Did you . . . know about Yann in San Diego?”

  “Yeah sure. We were friends, we went out. It was nice not to have to think about guys. People left us alone, or went for Yann. He’s a sweet guy, and this stuff in math—well, you know. He’s a kind of genius. He’s like Wittgenstein, or Turing.”

  “Hopefully happier than them.”

  “Were they unhappy?”

  “I don’t know. I seem to remember reading they were.”

  “Well, Yann seems pretty happy to me. He’s really smart and really nice and he pays attention to my work.” Unlike you, her expression said. “And he and Eleanor and I are getting good results.”
br />   “I’m glad. I really am! That’s why I came down here. I wanted to tell you about this, this possibility, of federally funded work.”

  “Why not talk with the Small Delivery management?”

  “I want the new institutes to be in full control of their scientific results. No private trade secrets or patents.”

  She thought that over.

  “What about with public universities?”

  “Like UCSD and a federal lab, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think that would be okay. I wish there was more of it. And there will be. We’re trying a bunch of things like that.”

  Marta nodded, interested despite herself.

  “We’ve got the go-ahead,” Frank said. “The go-ahead and the budget.”

  Now she was pursing her lips into a little bloodless bloom, her sign of serious thought. “San Diego.”

  “What?”

  “You said UCSD.”

  “Yes, that’s right. I’d have to recuse myself because of my position there, but it makes so much sense, Diane would run it through, I’m sure. Why? Do you want to move back there?”

  She gave him another look. “What do you think?”

  “I thought you liked it here.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Frank. We’re in Atlanta, Georgia.”

  “I know, I know. I thought it looked pretty nice, actually.”

  “My God. You’ve been out here too long.”

  “Probably so.”

  “It’s warped your mind.”

  “That’s very true.”

  Her stare grew suspicious, then calculating. “You can’t possibly like Washington, D.C.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I’m beginning to think it’s okay.”

  “It’s the East Coast, Frank! Jesus, you’ve lost your perspective out here. It’s a swamp! No beach, no ocean—”

  “There’s the Atlantic—”

  “No waves, and it’s hours to get to there, even if there were.”

  “I know.”

  “Frank,” she said, looking at him with new interest. “You’ve gone crazy.”

  “A little bit, yeah.”

  “That’s why you apologized to me.”

  “Well, I meant it. I should have said it before.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So maybe I’m getting less crazy.” He laughed, met her eye.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Ah well.”

  She watched him, shrugged. “Time will tell.”

  Again Frank understood that he had lost a relationship with someone he could have gotten along with. But now what had happened in the past had a kind of trajectory or inertia to it, that could not be altered; the relationship was wrecked for good. He caught a quick glimpse of a different life, he and Marta still together in San Diego. But the bad things that had happened could never be undone, and that whole world of possibility was gone, popped like a soap bubble.

  What if humanity’s relationship to Earth was like that?

  A nasty thought.

  It occurred to him that he could warn Marta about the surveillance they were living under, Yann too. But as with Francesca, he found he wasn’t ready for that—for what he would have to get into to tell her about it. I have this spook girlfriend, we’re all under surveillance, we’re part of an experiment in which computer programs bet on us, and our stock may now be rising. No.

  Instead he said, “So you would consider an offer to move your lab to a federal institute?”

  “Maybe. I’ll talk to Yann. But it might really crimp any chance for big compensation for all this.”

  “Well, but it won’t have much chance of happening at all if it stays in the private sector.”

  “That’s what you say. I’ll talk to Yann about it. And Eleanor. We’ll come to a decision together.”

  Frank nodded, yeah yeah yeah: point already taken, blade in to the hilt, no call to be twisting it.

  Marta, eyeing him, relented. “Make it so it could get us back to San Diego. That might do it. I need to get back in the water.”

  ANNA WAS CONVINCED THAT JOE HAD caught something in Khembalung, or on the long journey home. He had been more than usually fractious on all the return flights, and worse as they went on, from the confused tears in the helicopter to the exhausted screams on the final L.A.-to-Dulles leg. What with that and their own exhaustion, and the shock of the flood overwhelming Khembalung, they had reached the moment that sometimes happens in a bad trip, when everyone is thinking what a terrible idea it was to begin with and no one can think of anything to say, or even meet their fellow sufferers in the eye. Anna and Charlie had endured a few of these trips before, none quite so bad, but they both knew what the lack of eye contact meant and what the other one was thinking. Dispense with talk and do the necessary, in a kind of grim solidarity. Just get home.

  But then, at home, Joe’s dis-ease had continued, and to Anna he felt a little hot. She got out the thermometer, ignoring Charlie’s heavy look and biting her tongue to avoid yet another ridiculous argument on this topic of medical data gathering. Though he would not usually admit to it, Charlie suffered from a kind of magical thinking that believed that taking a temperature might invite an illness to appear which did not exist until it was measured. Anna suspected this came from the Christian Scientists in Charlie’s family background, giving him a tendency to see illness as the taint of sin. This was, of course, crazy.

  And Anna craved data, as usual. Taking a temperature was just a matter of getting more information. It always helped her to know things more precisely; the more she knew, the less her fears could imagine things worse than what she knew. So she took Joe’s temperature without consulting Charlie, and found it registered 99.0.

  “That’s his normal temperature,” Charlie pointed out.

  “What do you mean?” Anna said.

  “He always charts high.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Well it’s true. It happens every time I take him in for a checkup. I don’t think they’ve ever gotten a reading under 99 for him.”

  “Hmm.” Anna let that go. She was pretty sure it wasn’t true, but she certainly didn’t want to get into an argument that could only be resolved by getting into medical records. She knew that Joe felt warmer now than he had before, in her arms and on the nipple. And his face was always flushed. “Maybe we should take him in to be checked anyway.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Well, when is he scheduled for a checkup?”

  “I don’t know. It hasn’t been that long since the last one.”

  Anna gave up on it, not wanting to seethe. She would wait and see how things went for a day or two more, then insist if necessary. Take him in herself if she had to.

  After a fraught silence went on for quite a while, Charlie said, “Look, let’s see how he goes. If it still seems like there’s a problem I’ll take him in next week.”

  “Okay, good.”

  So it went in the world of Charlie and Anna, a world of telepathic negotiations made out of silence and gesture: a world in which the sharp words were usually felt in the air, or, if spoken in a burst of irritation, taken as one part of a mind reproving another, in the way one will easily snap at oneself for doing something foolish, knowing there is no one to misunderstand or get upset.

  But of course even an old matrimonial mindmeld is never total, and for his part, Charlie did not articulate, indeed hid in one of the far reaches of his mind, outside the reach of Anna’s telepathy, his worries about what might be wrong with Joe. He knew that to Anna he seemed afraid of the idea of illness, ready always to ignore it or condemn it, and that to her this was inappropriate, craven, counterproductive. But first of all, mind-body studies of placebos and positive attitudes gave some support to the idea of not tolerating or ritually opposing the idea of illness; and second, if she knew what he was really worrying about, the whole Joe/Khembalung dynamic, she would have thought him foolish
and maybe even a little naÏve and credulous, even though she respected the Khembalis and knew (he hoped) that they took this kind of thing seriously. How she managed to reconcile that he was not sure, but in regards to their own interaction, better for her to think he was still just in his old curse-the-disease mode. So he kept his thoughts to himself.

  Thus there was a dissonance there palpable to both of them, an awareness that they were not as fully known to each other as they usually were. Which also would worry Anna; but Charlie judged that the lesser of two worries, and held his tongue. No way was he going to bring up the possibility of some kind of problem in Joe’s spiritual life. What the hell was that, after all? And how would you measure it?

  So at work Anna spent her time trying to concentrate, over a persistent underlying turmoil of worry about her younger son. Work was absorbing, as always, and there was more to do than there was time to do it in, as always. And so it provided its partial refuge.

  But it was harder to dive in, harder to stay under the surface in the deep sea of bioinformatics. Even the content of the work reminded her, on some subliminal level, that health was a state of dynamic balance almost inconceivably complex, a matter of juggling a thousand balls while unicycling on a tightrope over the abyss—in a gale—at night—such that any life was an astonishing miracle, brief and tenuous. But enough of that kind of thinking! Bear down on the fact, on the moment and the problem of the moment!

  Frequently she found herself unable to concentrate no matter her exhortations, and she would spend an hour or two digging around on the internet, to see if she could find anything useful for Diane and Frank. Old things that had worked but been forgotten; new things that hadn’t yet been noticed or appreciated. This could be rather depressing, of course. The government sites devoted to climate change were often inadequate; the State Department’s page, for instance, began with the administration’s ludicrous goal of reducing carbon emissions by eighteen percent over ten years, by voluntary actions—a thumbing-of-the-nose to the Kyoto Accords that was still the current administration’s only tangible proposal for action. Conference proceedings on another page spoke of “climate change adaptation,” actually development agendas, with only a few very revealing admissions that “adaptation” had no meaning in regard to actual technologies, that the whole concept of “adaptation” to climate change was a replacement for “mitigation,” and at this point completely hollow, a word only, a way of saying Do nothing. Whole conferences were devoted to that.