Forty Signs of Rain

  “True.”

  “It’s really inexpensive down there now because of the unrest and all, so we’ll have it all to ourselves almost.”

  “True.”

  “So I’ll just call up the travel agent and have them put it all on my business-expenses card.”

  “Okay, go for it.”

  Then there was a kind of cracking sound and Charlie woke up for real.

  “Ah shit.”

  He knew just what had happened, because it had happened before. His dreaming mind had grown skeptical at something in a dream that was going too well or badly—in this case his implausibly powerful persuasiveness—and so he had dreamed up ever-more-unlikely scenarios, in a kind of test-to-destruction, until the dream had popped and he had awakened.

  It was almost funny, this relationship to dreams. Except sometimes they crashed at the most inopportune moments. It was perverse to probe the limits of believability rather than just go with the flow, but that was the way Charlie’s mind worked, apparently. Nothing he could do about it but groan and laugh, and try to train his sleeping mind into a more wish fulfillment–tolerant response.

  It turned out that in the real world it was a work-at-home day for Anna, scheduled to give Charlie a kind of poison ivy vacation from Joe. Charlie was planning to take advantage of that to go down to the office by himself for once, and have a talk with Phil about what to do next. It was crucial to get Phil on line for a set of small bills that would save the best of the comprehensive.

  He padded downstairs to find Anna cooking pancakes for the boys. Joe liked to use them as little frisbees. “Morning babe.”

  “Hi hon.” He kissed her on the ear, inhaling the smell of her hair. “I just had the most amazing dream. I could talk anybody into anything.”

  “How exactly was that a dream?”

  “Yeah right! Don’t tease me about that, obviously I can’t talk anybody into anything. No, this was definitely a dream. In fact I pushed it too far and killed it. I tried to talk you into going off with me to Jamaica, and you said yes.”

  She laughed merrily at the thought, and he laughed to see her laugh, and at the memory of the dream. And then it seemed like a gift instead of a mockery.

  He scanned the kitchen computer screen for the news. Stormy Monday, it proclaimed. Big storms were swirling up out of the subtropics, and the freshly minted blue of the Arctic Ocean was dotted by a daisy chain of white patches, all falling south. The highest satellite photos, covering most of the Northern Hemisphere, reminded Charlie of how his skin had looked right after his outbreak of poison ivy. A huge white blister had covered Southern California the day before; another was headed their way from Canada, this one a real bruiser—big, wet, slightly warmer than usual, pouring down on them from Saskatchewan.

  The media meteorologists were already in a lather of anticipation and analysis, not only over the arctic blast but also in response to a tropical storm now leaving the Bahamas, even though it had wreaked less damage than had been predicted.

  “ ‘Unimpressive,’ this guy calls it. My God! Everybody’s a critic. Now people are reviewing the weather.”

  “ ‘Tasteful little cirrus clouds,’ ” Anna quoted from somewhere.

  “Yeah. And I heard someone talking about an ‘ostentatious thunderhead.’ ”

  “It’s the melodrama,” Anna guessed. “Climate as bad art, as soap opera. Or some kind of unstaged reality TV.”

  “Or staged.”

  “Do you think you should stay home?”

  “No it’ll be okay. I’ll just be at work.”

  “Okay.” This made sense to Anna; it took a lot to keep her from going to work. “But be careful.”

  “I will. I’ll be indoors.”

  Charlie went back upstairs to get ready. A trip out without Joe! It was like a little adventure.

  Although once he was actually walking up Wisconsin, he found he kind of missed his little puppetmaster. He stood at a corner, waiting for the light to change, and when a tall semi rumbled by he said aloud, “Oooh, big truck!” which caused the others waiting for the light to give him a look. Embarrassing; but it was truly hard to remember he was alone. His shoulders kept flexing at the unaccustomed lack of weight. The back of his neck felt the wind on it. It was somehow an awful realization: he would rather have had Joe along. “Jesus, Quibler, what are you coming to.”

  It was good, however, not to have the straps of the baby backpack cutting across his chest. Even without them the poison ivy damage was prickling at the touch of his shirt and the first sheen of sweat. Since the encounter with the tree he had slept so poorly, spending so much of every night awake in an agony of unscratchable itching, that he felt thoroughly and completely deranged. His doctor had prescribed powerful oral steroids, and given him a shot of them too, so maybe that was part of it. That or simply the itching itself. Putting on clothes was like a kind of skin-deep electrocution.

  It had only taken a few days of that to reduce him to a gibbering semi-hallucinatory state. Now, over a week later, it was worse. His eyes were sandy; things had auras around them; noises made him jump. It was like the dregs of a crystal-meth jag, he imagined, or the last hours of an acid trip. A sandpapered brain, spacy and raw, everything leaping in through the senses.

  He took the Metro to Dupont Circle, got off there just to take a walk without Joe. He stopped at Kramer’s and got an espresso to go, then started around the circle to check the Dupont Second Story, but stopped when he realized he was doing exactly the things he would have done if he had had Joe with him.

  He carried on southeastward instead, strolling down Connecticut toward the Mall. As he walked he admired a great spectacle of clouds overhead, vast towers of pearly white lobes blooming upward into a high pale sky.

  He stopped at the wonderful map store on Eye Street, and for a while lost himself in the cloud shapes of other countries. Back outside, the clouds were growing in place rather than heaving in from the west or the southeast. Brilliant anvil heads were blossoming sixty thousand feet overhead, forming a hyper-Himalaya that looked as solid as marble.

  He pulled out his phone and put it in his left ear. “Phone, call Roy.”

  After a second: “Roy Anastophoulus.”

  “Roy, it’s Charlie. I’m coming on in.”

  “I’m not there.”

  “Ah come on!”

  “I know. When was the last time I actually saw you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have two kids, right?”

  “Oh, didn’t you hear?”

  “Ha ha ha. I’d like to see that.”

  “Jesus no.”

  “What are you going in for?”

  “I need to talk to Phil. I had a dream this morning that I could convince anybody of anything, even Joe. I convinced Phil to reintroduce the Chinese aerosols bill, and then I got you to approve it.”

  “That poison ivy has driven you barking mad.”

  “Very true. It must be the steroids. I mean, the clouds today are like pulsing. They don’t know which way to go.”

  “That’s probably right, there’s two low-pressure systems colliding here today, didn’t you hear?”

  “How could I not.”

  “They say it’s going to rain really hard.”

  “Looks like I’ll beat it to the office, though.”

  “Good. Hey listen, when Phil gets in, don’t be too hard on him. He already feels bad enough.”

  “He does?”

  “Well, no. Not really. I mean, when have you ever seen Phil feel bad about anything?”

  “Never.”

  “Right. But, you know. He would feel bad about this if he were to go in for that kind of thing. And you have to remember, he’s pretty canny at getting the most he can get from these bills. He sees the limits and then does what he can. It’s not a zero-sum game to him. He really doesn’t think of it as us-and-them.”

  “But sometimes it is us-and-them.”

  “True. But he takes the long view. La
ter some of them will be part of us. And meanwhile, he finds some pretty good tricks. Breaking the superbill into parts might have been the right way to go. We’ll get back to a lot of this stuff later.”

  “Maybe. We never tried the Chinese aerosols again.”

  “Not yet.”

  Charlie stopped listening to check the street he was crossing. When he started listening again Roy was saying, “So you dreamed you were Xenophon, eh?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Xenophon. He wrote the Anabasis, which tells the story of how he and a bunch of Greek mercenaries got stuck and had to fight all the way across Turkey to get home to Greece. They argue the whole time about what to do, and Xenophon wins every argument, and all his plans always work perfectly. I think of it as the first great political fantasy novel. So who else did you convince?”

  “Well, I got Joe to potty train himself, and then I convinced Anna to leave the kids at home and go with me on a vacation to Jamaica.”

  Roy laughed heartily. “Dreams are so funny.”

  “Yeah, but bold. So bold. Sometimes I wake up and wonder why I’m not as bold as that all the time. I mean, what have we got to lose?”

  “Jamaica, baby. Hey, did you know that some of those hotels on the north shore there are catering to couples who like to have a lot of semipublic sex, out around the pools and the beaches?”

  “Talk about fantasy novels.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you think it’d be interesting?”

  “You are sounding kind of, I don’t want to say desperate here, but deprived maybe?”

  “It’s true, I am. It’s been weeks.”

  “Oh poor guy. It’s been weeks since I left my house.”

  Actually, for Roy a few weeks was quite a long time between amorous encounters. One of the not-so-hidden secrets of Washington, D.C., was that among the ambitious young single people gathered there to run the world, there was a whole lot of collegial sex going on. Now Roy said dolefully, “I guess I’ll have to go dancing tonight.”

  “Oh poor you! I’ll be at home not scratching myself.”

  “You’ll be fine. You’ve already got yours. Hey listen, my food has come.”

  “So where are you anyway?”

  “Bombay Club.”

  “Ah geez.” This was a restaurant run by a pair of Indian-Americans, its decor Raj, its food excellent. A favorite of staffers, lobbyists and other political types. Charlie loved it.

  “Tandoori salmon?” he said.

  “That’s right. It looks and smells fantastic.”

  “Yesterday my lunch was Gerber’s baby spinach.”

  “No. You don’t really eat that stuff.”

  “Yeah sure. It’s not so bad. It could use a little salt.”

  “Yuck!”

  “Yeah, see what I do is I mix a little spinach and a little banana together?”

  “Oh come on quit it!”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  The light under the thunderheads had gone dim. Rain was soon to arrive. The cloud bottoms were black. Splotches like dropped water balloons starred the sidewalk pavement. Charlie started hurrying, and got to Phil’s office just ahead of a downpour.

  He looked back out through the glass doors and watched the rain grow in strength, hammering down the length of the Mall. The skies had really opened. The raindrops remained large in the air; it looked like hail the size of baseballs had coalesced in the thunderheads, and then somehow been melted back to rain again before reaching the ground.

  Charlie watched the spectacle for a while, then went upstairs. There he found out from Evelyn that Phil’s flight in had been delayed, and that he might be driving back from Richmond instead.

  Charlie sighed. No conferring with Phil today.

  He read reports instead, and made notes for when Phil did arrive. Went down to get his mailbox cleared. Evelyn’s office window had a southerly view, with the Capitol looming to the left, and across the Mall the Air and Space Museum. In the rainy light the big buildings took on an eerie cast. They looked like the cottages of giants.

  Then it was past noon, and Charlie was hungry. The rain seemed to have eased a bit since its first impact, so he went out to get a sandwich at the Iranian deli on C Street, grabbing an umbrella at the door.

  Outside it was raining steadily but lightly. The streets were deserted. Many intersections had flooded to the curbs, and in a few places well over the curbs, onto the sidewalks.

  Inside the deli the grill was sizzling, but the place was almost as empty as the streets. Two cooks and the cashier were standing under a TV that hung from a ceiling corner, watching the news. When they recognized Charlie they went back to looking at the TV. The characteristic smell of basmati rice and hummus enfolded him.

  “Big storm coming,” the cashier said. “Ready to order?”

  “Yeah, thanks. I’ll have the usual, pastrami sandwich on rye and potato chips.”

  “Flood too,” one of the cooks said.

  “Oh yeah?” Charlie replied. “What, more than usual?”

  The cashier nodded, still looking at the TV. “Two storms and high tide. Upstream, downstream and middle.”

  “Oh my.”

  Charlie wondered what it would mean. Then he stood watching the TV with the rest of them. Satellite weather photos showed a huge sheet of white pouring across New York and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile that tropical storm was spinning past Bermuda. It looked like another perfect storm might be brewing, like the eponymous one of 1991. Not that it took a perfect storm these days to make the Mid-Atlantic states seem like a literal designation. A far less than perfect storm could do it. The TV spoke of eleven-year tide cycles, of the longest and strongest El Niño ever recorded. “It’s a fourteen-thousand-square-mile watershed,” the TV said.

  “It’s gonna get wet,” Charlie observed.

  The Iranians nodded silently. Five years earlier they would probably have been closing the deli, but this was the fourth “perfect storm” synergistic combination in the last three years, and they, like everyone else, were getting jaded. It was Peter crying wolf at this point, even though the previous three storms had all been major disasters at the time, at least in some places. But never in D.C. Now people just made sure their supplies and equipment were okay and then went about their business, umbrella and phone in hand. Charlie was no different, he realized, even though he had been performing the role of Peter for all he was worth when it came to the global situation. But here he was, getting a pastrami sandwich with the intention of going back to work. It seemed like the best way to deal with it.

  The Iranians finally finished his order, all the while watching the TV images: flooding fields, apparently in the upper Potomac watershed, near Harpers Ferry.

  “Three meters,” the cashier said as she gave him his change, but Charlie wasn’t sure what she meant. The cook chopped Charlie’s wrapped sandwich in half, put it in a bag. “First one is worst one.”

  Charlie took it and hurried back through the darkening streets. He passed an occasional lit window, occupied by people working at computer terminals, looking like figures in a Hopper painting.

  Now it began to rain hard again, and the wind was roaring in the trees and hooting around the building corners. The curiously low-angle nature of the city made big patches of lowering sky visible through the rain.

  Charlie stopped at a street corner and looked around. His skin was on fire. Things looked too wet and underlit to be real; it looked like stage lighting for some moment of ominous portent. Once again he felt that he had crossed over into a space where the real world had taken on all the qualities of a dream, becoming as glossy and surreal, as unlikely and beautiful, as stuffed to a dark sheen with ungraspable meaning. Sometimes just being outdoors in bad weather was all it took.

  Back in the office he settled at his desk, and ate while looking over his list of things to do. The sandwich was good. The coffee from the office’s coffee machine was bad. He wrote an update report to Phil, urging him to
follow up on the elements of the bill that seemed to be dropping into the cracks. We have to do these things.

  The sound of the rain outside made him think of the Khembalis and their low-lying island. What could they possibly do to help their watery home? Thinking about it, he Googled “Khembalung,” and when he saw there were over eight thousand references, Googled “Khembalung + history.” That got him only dozens, and he called up the first one that looked interesting, a site called “Shambhala Studies” from an .edu site.

  The first paragraph left his mouth hanging open: Khembalung, a shifting kingdom. Previously Shambhala … He skimmed down the screen, scrolling slowly:

  … when the warriors of Han invade central Tibet, Khembalung’s turn will have arrived. A person named Drepung will come from the East, a person named Sonam will come from the North, a person named Padma will come from the West …

  “Holy shit—”

  … the first incarnation of Rudra was born as King of Olmolungring in 16,017 BC.

  … then dishonesty and greed will prevail, an ideology of brutal materialism will spread all over the earth. The tyrant will come to believe there is no place left to conquer, but the mists will lift and reveal Shambhala. Outraged to find he does not rule all, the tyrant will attack, but at that point Rudra Cakrin will rise and lead a mighty host against the invaders. After a big battle the evil will be destroyed (see Plate 4)

  “Holy moly.”

  Charlie read on, face just inches from the screen, which was now also the dim room’s lamp. Reappearance of the kingdom … reincarnation of its lamas … This began a section describing the methods used for locating reincarnated lamas when they reappeared in a new life. The hairs on Charlie’s forearms suddenly prickled, and a wave of itching rolled over his body. Toddlers speaking in tongues, recognizing personal items from the previous incarnation’s belongings—

  His phone rang and he jumped a foot.

  “Hello!”

  “Charlie! Are you all right?”

  “Hi babe, yeah, you just startled me.”

  “Sorry, oh good. I was worried, I heard on the news that downtown is flooding, the Mall is flooding.”