Forty Signs of Rain

  Out of the elevator, onto Wisconsin. Bethesda was too dismal. A spew of office and apartment blocks, obviously organized (if that was the word) for the convenience of the cars roaring by. A ridiculous, inhuman autopia. It might as well have been Orange County.

  He dragged down the sidewalk home. Walked in the front door. The screen door slapped behind him with its characteristic whack.

  From the kitchen: “Hi hon!”

  “Hi Dad!”

  It was Anna and Nick’s day to come home together after school.

  “Momma Momma Momma!”

  “Hi Joe!”

  Refuge. “Hi guys,” Charlie said. “We need a rowboat. We’ll keep it in the garage.”

  “Cool!”

  Anna heard his tone of voice and came out of the kitchen with a whisk in hand, gave him a hug and a peck on the cheek.

  “Hmm,” he said, a kind of purr.

  “What’s wrong babe.”

  “Oh, everything.”

  “Poor hon.”

  He began to feel better. He released Joe from the stroller and they followed Anna into the kitchen. As Anna picked up Joe and held him on her hip while she continued to cook, Charlie began to shape the story of the day in his mind, to be able to tell her about it with all its drama intact.

  After he had told the story, and fulminated for a bit, and opened and drunk a beer, Anna said, “What you need is some way to bypass the political process.”

  “Whoa babe. I’m not sure I want to know what you mean there.”

  “I don’t know anyway.”

  “Revolution, right?”

  “No way.”

  “A completely nonviolent and successful positive revolution?”

  “Good idea.”

  Nick appeared in the doorway. “Hey Dad, want to play some baseball?”

  “Sure. Good idea.”

  Nick seldom proposed this, it was usually Charlie’s idea, and so when Nick did it he was trying to make Charlie feel better, which just by itself worked pretty well. So they left the coolness of the house and played in the steamy backyard, under the blind eyes of the banked apartment windows. Nick stood against the brick back of the house while Charlie pitched wiffle balls at him, and he smacked them with a long plastic bat. Charlie tried to catch them if he could. They had about a dozen balls, and when they were scattered over the downsloping lawn, they re-collected them on Charlie’s mound and did it over again, or let Charlie take a turn at bat. The wiffle balls were great; they shot off the bat with a very satisfying plastic whirr, and yet it was painless to get hit by one, as Charlie often learned. Back and forth in the livid dusk, sweating and laughing, trying to get a wiffle ball to go straight.

  Charlie took off his shirt and sweated into the sweaty air. “Okay here comes the pitch. Sandy Koufax winds up, rainbow curve! Hey why didn’t you swing?”

  “That was a ball, Dad. It bounced before it got to me.”

  “Okay here I’ll try again. Oh Jesus. Never mind.”

  “Why do you say Jesus, Dad?”

  “It’s a long story. Okay here’s another one. Hey, why didn’t you swing?”

  “It was a ball!”

  “Not by much. Walks won’t get you off de island mon.”

  “The strike zone is taped here to the house, Dad. Just throw one that would hit inside it and I’ll swing.”

  “That was a bad idea. Okay, here you go. Ooh, very nice. Okay, here you go. Hey come on swing at those!”

  “That one was behind me.”

  “Switch-hitting is a valuable skill.”

  “Just throw strikes!”

  “I’m trying. Okay here it comes, boom! Very nice! Home run, wow. Uh-oh, it got stuck in the tree, see that?”

  “We’ve got enough anyway.”

  “True, but look, I can get a foot onto this branch … here, give me the bat for a second. Might as well get it while we remember where it is.”

  Charlie climbed a short distance up the tree, steadied himself, brushed leaves aside, reached in and embraced the trunk for balance, knocked the wiffle ball down with Nick’s bat.

  “There you go!”

  “Hey Dad, what’s that vine growing up into the tree? Isn’t that poison ivy?”

  Let’s rehearse what we know about who we are. We are primates, very closely related to chimps and other great apes. Our ancestors speciated from the other apes about five million years ago, and evolved in parallel lines and overlapping subspecies, emerging most clearly as hominids about two million years ago.

  East Africa in this period was getting drier and drier. The forest was giving way to grassland savannahs dotted with scattered groves of trees. We evolved to adapt to that landscape: the hairlessness, the upright posture, the sweat glands, and other physical features. They all made us capable of running long distances in the open sun near the equator. We ran for a living and covered broad areas. We used to run game down by following it until it tired out, sometimes days later.

  In that basically stable mode of living the generations passed, and during the many millennia that followed, the size of hominid brains evolved from about three hundred cubic millimeters to about nine hundred cubic millimeters. This is a strange fact, because everything else remained relatively stable. The implication is that the way we lived then was tremendously stimulating to the growth of the brain. Almost every aspect of hominid life has been proposed as the main driver of this growth, everything from the calculation of accurate rock throwing to the ability to dream, but certainly among the most important must have been language and social life. We talked, we got along; it’s a difficult process, requiring lots of thought. Because reproduction is crucial to any definition of evolutionary success, getting along with the group and with the opposite sex is fundamentally adaptive, and so it must be a big driver of increasing brain size. We grew so fast we can hardly fit through the birth canal these days. All that growth from trying to understand other people, the other sex, and look where we are.

  ANNA WAS pleased to see Frank back in the office, brusque and grouchy though he was. He made things more interesting. A rant against oversized pickup trucks would morph into an explanation of everything in terms of yes or no, or a discussion of the social intelligence of gibbons, or an algebra of the most efficient division of labor in the lab. It was impossible to predict what he would say next. Sentences would start reasonably and then go strange, or vice versa. Anna liked that.

  He did, however, seem overly impressed by game theory. “What if the numbers don’t correspond to real life?” she asked him. “What if you don’t get five points for defecting when the other person doesn’t, what if all those numbers are off, or even backward? Then it’s just another computer game, right?”

  “Well—” Frank was taken aback. A rare sight. Immediately he was thinking it over. That was another thing Anna liked about him; he would really think about what she said.

  Then Anna’s phone rang and she picked up.

  “Charlie! Oh dovelie, how are you?”

  “Screaming agony.”

  “Oh babe. Did you take your pills?”

  “I took them. They’re not doing a thing. I’m starting to see things in the corners of my eyes, crawlies you know? I think the itches have gotten into my brain. I’m going nuts.”

  “Just hold on. It’ll take a couple of days for the steroids to have an effect. Keep taking them. Is Joe giving you a break?”

  “No. He wants to wrestle.”

  “Oh God don’t let him! I know the doctor said it wasn’t transmissible, but still—”

  “Don’t worry. Not a fucking chance of wrestling.”

  “You’re not touching him?”

  “And he’s not touching me, that’s right. He’s getting pretty pissed off about it.”

  “You’re putting on the plastic gloves to change him?”

  “Yes yes yes yes, tortures of the damned, when I take them off the skin comes too, blood and yuck, and then I get so itchy.”

  “Poor babe. Just try not t
o do anything.”

  Then he had to chase Joe out of the kitchen. Anna hung up.

  Frank looked at her. “Poison ivy?”

  “Yep. He climbed into a tree that had it growing up its trunk. He didn’t have his shirt on.”

  “Oh no.”

  “It got him pretty good. Nick recognized it, and so I took him to urgent care and the doctor put some stuff on him and put him on steroids even before the blistering began, but he’s still pretty wiped out.”

  “Sorry to hear.”

  “Yeah, well, at least it’s something superficial.”

  Then Frank’s phone rang, and he went into his cubicle to answer. Anna couldn’t help but hear his end of it, as they had already been talking—and then also, as the call went on, his voice got louder several times. At one point he said “You’re kidding” four times in a row, each time sounding more incredulous. After that he only listened for a while, his fingers drumming on the tabletop next to his terminal.

  Finally he said, “I don’t know what happened, Derek. You’re the one who’s in the best position to know that.… Yeah, that’s right. They must have had their reasons.… Well you’ll be okay whatever happens, you were vested right? … Everyone has options they don’t exercise, don’t think about that, think about the stock you did have.… Hey that’s one of the winning endgames. Go under, go public, or get bought. Congratulations.… Yeah it’ll be fascinating to see, sure. Sure. Yeah, that is too bad. Okay yeah. Call me back with the whole story when I’m not at work here. Yeah bye.”

  He hung up. There was a long silence from his cubicle.

  Finally he got up from his chair, squeak-squeak. Anna swiveled to look, and there he was, standing in her doorway, expecting her to turn.

  He made a funny face. “That was Derek Gaspar, out in San Diego. His company Torrey Pines Generique has been bought.”

  “Oh really! That’s the one you helped start?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, congratulations then. Who bought it?”

  “A bigger biotech called Small Delivery Systems, have you ever heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “I hadn’t either. It’s not one of the big pharmaceuticals by any means, midsized from what Derek says. Mostly into agropharmacy, he says, but they approached him and made the offer. He doesn’t know why.”

  “They must have said?”

  “Well, no. At least he doesn’t seem to be clear on why they did it.”

  “Interesting. So, well—it’s still good, right? I mean, I thought this was what start-ups hoped for.”

  “True …”

  “But you’re not looking like someone who has just become a millionaire or whatever.”

  He quickly waved that away, “It’s not that, I’m not involved like that. I was only ever a consultant, UCSD only lets you have a small involvement in outside firms. I had to stop even that when I came here. Can’t be working for the Feds and someone else too, you know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My investments are in a blind trust, so who knows. I didn’t have much in Torrey Pines, and the trust may have gotten rid of it. I heard something that made me think they did. I would have if I were them.”

  “Oh well that’s too bad then.”

  “Yeah yeah,” frowning at her. “But that isn’t the problem.”

  He stared out the window, across the atrium into all the other windows. There was a look on his face she had never seen before—chagrined—she couldn’t quite read it. Distressed.

  “What is then?”

  Quietly he said, “I don’t know.” Then: “The system is messed up.”

  She said, “You should come to the brown bag lecture tomorrow. Rudra Cakrin, the Khembali ambassador, is going to be talking about the Buddhist view of science. No, you should. You sound more like them than anyone else, at least sometimes.”

  He frowned as if this were a criticism.

  “No, come on. I want you to.”

  “Okay. Maybe. If I finish a letter I’m working on.”

  He went back to his cubicle, sat down heavily. “God damn it,” Anna heard him say.

  Then he started to type. It was like the sound of thought itself, a rapid-fire plastic tipping and tapping, interrupted by hard whaps of his thumb against the space bar. His keyboard really took a pounding sometimes.

  He was still typing like a madman when Anna saw her clock and rushed out the door to try to get home on time.

  THE NEXT morning Frank drove in with his farewell letter in a manila envelope. He had decided to elaborate on it, make it into a fully substantiated, crushing indictment of NSF, which, if taken seriously, might do some good. He was going to give it directly to Diane Chang. Private letter, one hard copy. That way she could read it, consider it in private, and decide whether she wanted to do something about it. Meanwhile, whatever she did, he would have taken his shot at trying to improve the place, and could go back to real science with a clean conscience. Leave in peace. Leave behind some of the anger in him. Hopefully.

  He had heavily revised the draft he had written on the flight back from San Diego. Bulked up the arguments, made the criticisms more specific, made some concrete suggestions for improvements. It was still a pretty devastating indictment when he was done, but this time it was all in the tone of a scientific paper. No getting mad or getting eloquent. Five pages single-spaced, even after he had cut it to the bone. Well, they needed a kick in the pants. This would certainly do that.

  He read it through one more time, then sat there in his office chair, tapping the manila envelope against his leg, looking sightlessly out into the atrium. Wondering, among other things, what had happened to Torrey Pines Generique. Wondering if the hire of Yann Pierzinski had anything to do with it.

  Suddenly he heaved out of his chair, walked to the elevators with the manila envelope and its contents, took an elevator up to the twelfth floor. Walked around to Diane’s office and nodded to Laveta, Diane’s secretary. He put the envelope in Diane’s in-box.

  “She’s gone for today,” Laveta told him.

  “That’s all right. Let her know when she comes in tomorrow that it’s there, will you? It’s personal.”

  “All right.”

  Back to the sixth floor. He went to his chair and sat down. It was done.

  He heard Anna in her office, typing away. Her door was closed, so presumably she was using her electric breast pump to milk herself while she was working. Frank would have liked to have seen that, not just for prurient reasons, though there were those too, but more for the pleasure of seeing her multitasking like that. She typed with forefingers and thumbs only, like a 1930’s reporter in the movies; whether this was an unconscious rejection of all secretarial skills or simply happenstance, he couldn’t say. But he bet it made for an attractive sight.

  He recalled that this was the day she wanted him to join her at the brown-bag lecture. She had apparently helped to arrange for the Khembali ambassador to give the talk. Frank had seen it listed on a sheet announcing the series, posted next to the elevators:

  “Purpose of Science from the Buddhist Perspective.”

  It didn’t sound promising to him. Esoteric at best, and perhaps much worse. That would not be atypical for these lunch talks, they were a very mixed bag. People were burnt out on regular lectures, the last thing they wanted to do at lunch was listen to more of the same, so this series was deliberately geared toward entertainment. Frank remembered seeing titles like “Antarctica as Utopia,” or “The Art of Body Imaging,” or “Ways Global Warming Can Help Us.” Apparently it was a case of the wackier the topic, the bigger the crowd.

  This one would no doubt be well-attended.

  Anna’s door opened and Frank’s head jerked up, reflexively seeking the sight of a bare-chested science goddess, something like the French figure of Liberty; but of course not. She was just leaving for the lecture.

  “Are you going to come?” she asked.

  “Yeah sure.”

  That pleas
ed her. He accompanied her to the elevators, shaking his head at her, and at himself. Up to the tenth floor, past the spectacular Antarctic underwater photo gallery, into the big conference room. It held about two hundred people. By the time the Khembalis arrived, every seat was occupied.

  Frank sat down near the back, pretending to work on his hand pad. Air-conditioned air fell on him like a blessing. People who knew each other were finding each other, sitting down in groups, talking about this and that. The Khembalis stood by the lectern, discussing mike arrangements with Anna and Laveta. The old ambassador, Rudra Cakrin, wore his maroon robes, while the rest of the Khembali contingent were in off-white cotton pants and shirts, as if in India. Rudra Cakrin needed his mike lowered. His young assistant helped him, then adjusted his own. Translation; what a pain. Frank groaned soundlessly.

  They tested the mikes, and the noise of talk dampened. The room was impressively full, Frank had to admit, wacky factor or not. These were people still interested enough in ideas to spend a lunch hour listening to a lecture on the philosophy of science. It would be like that in some departments at UCSD, perhaps even on most university campuses, despite the insane pace of life. Surplus time and energy, given over to curiosity: a fundamental hominid behavioral trait. The basic trait that got people into science, that made science in the first place, surviving despite the mind-numbing regimes of its modern-day expression. Here he was himself, after all, and no one could be more burnt out and disenchanted than he was. But still following a tropism helplessly, like a sunflower turning to look at the sun.

  The old monk cut quite a figure up at the lectern. Incongruous at best. This might be an admirably curious audience, but it was also a skeptical gang of hardened old technocrats. A tough sell, one would think, for a wizened man in robes, now peering out at them as if from a distant century, looking in fact quite like an early hominid.