Sixty Days and Counting

  “What was that all about?” Charlie said.

  “I don’t know,” Anna replied. “But I’m wondering if he found that woman in the elevator.”

  Anna had been pleased when Diane asked her to join the Presidential Science Advisor’s staff, but it only took her a short period of reflection to decide against accepting the offer.

  She knew she was right to do so, but explaining why to Diane and Frank had been a little tricky. She couldn’t just come out and say “I prefer doing things to advising people to do things,” or “I like science more than politics.” It wouldn’t have been polite, and besides, she wasn’t sure that was the real reason anyway. So all she could do was claim an abiding interest in her work at NSF, which was true. It was always best when your lies were true.

  “But you’re the one who has been finding all these programs that knit together the federal agencies,” Frank said. “You’d be perfect to help in a project like this. You could maybe come over on loan for a year or so.”

  This confirmed Anna’s suspicion that it was Frank’s idea to invite her over to the White House. Very nice of him, she liked that very much—but she said, “I can keep doing that from here, and still run my division too.”

  “Maybe.”

  Frank frowned, almost said something, stopped. Anna could not guess what it might have been. Some personal appeal? He looked a bit flushed. But maybe he was abashed at the thought of how little time he now had to give to his work on biological algorithms, his actual field. With this move he had shifted almost entirely to policy—to administration. To politics, in a word.

  Of course maybe their circumstances called for a shift from science to policy, as an emergency measure, so to speak. Also an application of science to policy, which she knew was what Frank had in mind. Anna knew it was very common among scientists to be science snobs, and hold that no work in the world was as good and worthy as scientific research. Anna did not want to fall prey to that error even though she felt it pretty strongly herself, or at least, felt that she was better at science than at any of the mushier stuff. Correcting for that bias adequately was one part of the confusion of her feelings about all this. She would make lists sometimes of arguments pro and con, of qualities and their relative values, attempting to quantify and thus clarify her feelings.

  In any case she held to her refusal, and to her job at NSF. And as she sat in the Metro on the way home, she thought somewhat grimly that it was too bad that Charlie hadn’t stuck to his guns too, and refused his new job offer like she had. Because here she was going home early again, to pick up Nick from school and take him to his piano lessons.

  Of course Charlie’s situation had been different: he had been faced with a case of “come back or lose your job.” Still—if he had held—how much easier life would have been for her. Not that she ever shirked any work at all, but it would have been easier for the boys too. Not so much Nick, but Joe. She was intensely worried about Joe going into the White House daycare center. Was he ready for that? Would it make him even stranger—stranger and more difficult, to put it plainly—than he already was? Or would it normalize him? Was he perhaps autistic? Or just fractious? And why was he fractious? And what would be the effect on him (and on the other children) of confining him in a single room or group or situation for an entire day? Even Charlie, with all his energy and flexibility, had not been able to keep up with Joe’s demand for the new. She was afraid that in daycare, he and everyone around him would go mad.

  Not that she put it exactly that way to herself. In her conscious mind she focused on incremental changes, specific worries, without moving on to larger and vaguer concepts. The conscious mind wasn’t the whole story, as she knew from her troubled sleep, but that was what she could actually think about and work on directing, and so she did.

  This was one of many differences between her and Charlie, most of which were accentuated when they both worked at home. This was a bad system for other reasons, because it meant Joe was around too, scheming for attention when she was attempting to work or think, but sometimes it just had to be done, as when the Metro was down for the supposedly last round of flood repairs. And there she would be, at the computer, staring at the spreadsheet on the screen, entering data on pesticides in stream water as part of a project to measure their effects on amphibians, endless lists of chemical and product names collated from a wide range of studies, so that quantities had to be normed and reformatted and analyzed, meaning a whole flurry of highly specific technical e-mails from colleagues to be dealt with—questions, comments, criticisms concerning details of math or chemistry or statistical methodology, working in the parts per billion range—

  And at the same time Charlie would be audible from the floor below, trying to amuse Joe while holding a simultaneous headphone conversation with his friend Roy, shouting out things like, “Roy these are not IDIOTS you’re dealing with here, you can’t just LIE to them! WHAT? Okay well maybe you can lie to THEM, but make it a smart lie. Put it at the level of myth, these are like Punch and Judy figures, and your people want to be doing the punching! Sledgehammer them in the forehead with this stuff! JOE! STOP THAT!”

  And so on. Sledgehammer them in the forehead? Really, Anna couldn’t bear to listen.

  But now this was Charlie’s work, full-time and more—meaning, as in the old days, evenings too. Of course Anna spent a lot of evenings working, but for Charlie it was something he had not done since Joe had arrived. Endless phone conversations now, how much help could these be? Of course there was the new administration’s first sixty days to execute successfully, accounting for much of this rush, but Anna doubted that very much would come of that. How could it? The system was simply slower than that. You could only do things at the speed they could be done.

  So, whereas before she had most often come home to find the house in an uproar, Charlie cooking operatically while Joe banged pots and Nick read under the lamp in his corner of the couch, with the dinner soon to be on the table, now she often got home to find Nick sitting there like an owl, reading in the dark, and no one else home at all—and her heart would go out to him, all alone at seven p.m., at age twelve—

  “You’ll go blind,” she would say.

  “Mom,” he would object happily.

  —and she would kiss his head and turn on his light and barge around banging her toes as she turned on the other lights and went out to the kitchen to rustle something up before she starved—and sometimes there would be nothing in the fridge or the cupboards that she could cook or eat, and grumpily she would throw on her daypack and tell Nick to answer the phone, if she did not need him to come along and carry extra bags, and would walk down the street to the Giant grocery store, still grumpy at first but then enjoying the walk—

  And then at the grocery store there would be no meat on the shelves, and few fresh veggies, fewer fruits. She would have to forget about her list and troll the aisles for something palatable, amazed once again at the sight of so many empty shelves—she had thought like everyone else that it would be a temporary thing—then getting angry at people for their selfish hoarding instincts. Before this winter—ever since the flood, really—people had hoarded some of the essentials, but now it had spread far beyond toilet paper and bottled water, to almost every shelf in the store. But particularly to all the foods she most liked to eat. It had gotten so bad that once, when in her hurry she had driven the car, she got back in and drove over to the smaller grocery store on Woodson, and they didn’t have any eggplant either, though she craved it. So she got zucchini instead, and back home, late, starving, made chicken soup.

  All this distracted her as she worked over the data in her biostatistical studies, but it also caused her to continue to think about the situation. She had chosen to stay at NSF because she felt she could do more there, and that NSF still had a crucial part to play in the larger effort. It was a small agency but it was central, in that it coordinated basic scientific research—really the heart of all their solutions. So she con
tinued to do her work there, organizing the grant evaluation process and running the division. And when she could she kept working on the FCCSET program she had discovered, which Diane was going to try to get OMB to get Chase to reinstate—that kind of coordination of all the federal departments and agencies into overarching project architectures was a development with huge potential. But there had to be other things she could do too. She talked to Alyssa and the others in her office about it, she talked to Diane and Edgardo, she talked to Drepung, and then to Sucandra.

  Sucandra she found particularly interesting. He was the one who had been her Cognizant Program Manager, so to speak, at the Khembalung Institute for Higher Studies, and he had been the single most disconcerting person she had ever talked to about the underlying purposes of science, being a doctor himself (but of Tibetan medicine) as well as a kind of Buddhist teacher, or even mentor to her, if there could be such a thing—as well as her Tibetan tutor, which she liked the best as being the most straightforward of their interactions. But in that context she mentioned to him once her attempt to balance her scientific work with something larger, amorphous though it might be.

  He said to her: “Look to China.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “To keep us hoarding!” Anna insisted.

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

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

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

  “It’s insane,” Frank said.

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

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

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

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

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

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