Sixty Days and Counting

  “Have you ever looked into that house on Linnean?”

  “Yeah, I think I know the one you mean. Bunch of kids. They don’t want old drunk ladies there.”

  “Oh I don’t know. They seemed friendly to me. All kinds of people. I think you’d be fine with them.”

  “I don’t know. They drink a lot.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Frank said, which made her laugh her nicotine laugh. “Well, maybe one of those church outreach groups,” he added, “if that’s what you’re looking for. There wouldn’t be any drinking there.”

  “Okay okay, maybe I better check out the kids after all!”

  The next morning, Emerson:

  “Yesterday night, at fifteen minutes after eight, my little Waldo ended his life.”

  Only son. Scarlet fever. Six years old.

  Frank wandered the streets of the city. Strange to feel so bad for a man long dead. Reading all the ecstatic sentences one could conclude Emerson had been some kind of space cadet, soaring through some untroubled space cadet life. But it wasn’t so. “To be out of the war, out of debt, out of the drought, out of the blues, out of the dentist’s hands, out of the second thoughts, mortifications, and remorses that inflict such twinges and shooting pains—out of the next winter, and the high prices, and company below your ambition…” This was the world they all lived in. He had loved a world where death could strike down anyone at any time. A young wife—a treasured friend—even his own boy. A boy like Nick or Joe. And it was still like that now. The odds had been improved, but nothing was certain. Surgeons had drained a blood clot on his brain. Without science he would have died, or been one of those mysterious people who always fucked up, who could not conduct their lives properly. All from a pop on the nose.

  Whereas now, on the other hand, he was wandering the streets of Washington, D.C., a homeless person working at the White House with burnt-out Vietnam vets for friends and a spook girlfriend he did not know how to find! Miracles of modern medicine! Well, not all of that was his fault. Some kind of fate. Followed step by step it had all made sense. It was just a situation. It could be dealt with. It could be surfed. All his people were alive, after all—except Rudra Cakrin—and there he did what he could to keep him alive in his thoughts. Rudra would have said this, Rudra would have thought that. Good idea!

  Up 19th Street to Dupont and then Connecticut, into his neighborhood of restaurants, bookstores, the laundromat by UDC. Certain neighborhoods became one’s own, while the great bulk of the city remained no more than various terrain to be traversed. Only a few city dwellers had London-taxi-driver knowledge of their city. He followed his routes in the great metropolis.

  He seldom went to the Optimodal that Diane had found on New York Avenue. It was one of his known places when not at work, and thus to be avoided. It meant he didn’t see Diane then, which was too bad, but they still did their lunch walks on most days. She was getting frustrated at the many ways things could bog down.

  He went to the drop spot under the tree again, and found undisturbed the last note he had left for Caroline. He crumpled it up, left another one.

  HI ARE YOU OKAY? WRITE ME

  He left it and walked away.

  The following week, only that note was there.

  He stood there in the knot of trees. Carved into the trunk of one was a simple figure, like a cross between Kilroy and Kokopelli. The shaman, looking out at him. Autumn forest, brassy in the afternoon light. Where was she, what was she doing? Even without a clot on the brain one could feel baffled. Right here they had lain kissing. Two creatures huddled together. Something was keeping her from making the drop.

  The Air Intelligence Agency. Army Intelligence and Security Command. Central Intelligence Agency. National Clandestine Service. Coast Guard Intelligence. Defense Intelligence Agency. Office of Intelligence, Department of Energy (really?). Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State. Office of Intelligence Support, Department of the Treasury. National Security Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate. Marine Corps Intelligence Activity. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. National Intelligence Council. National Reconnaissance Office. National Security Agency. Office of Naval Intelligence. United States Secret Service.

  The Covert Action Staff. The Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The Directorate of Operations. Drug Enforcement Administration. Office of National Security Intelligence.

  The United States Intelligence Community (a cooperative federation).

  Out on his run with Edgardo the next day, he said, “Are there really as many intelligence agencies as they say there are?”

  “No.” Pause for a beat. “There are more.”

  “Shit.” Slowly, haltingly, Frank told him about the situation with Caroline and the dead drop. “She said she would use it. So I’m worried. I feel helpless.”

  They ran on in silence from the Washington Monument to the Capitol, and then back to the Washington Monument again; an unprecedented span of silence in Frank’s experience of running with Edgardo. He waited curiously.

  Finally Edgardo said, “You should consider that maybe she is out of town. That maybe she is involved in the effort to deal with these guys, and so has to stay away.”

  “Ah.”

  It was like taking a pressure off the brain.

  Thoreau said, “I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.”

  Oooooooop! And the gibbon chorus at dawn? It represented joy. It was saying I’m alive. Bert still started it every morning he was out in the enclosure at dawn. May too was an enthusiast. Sleeping in his VW van parked on Linnean, he could start each day joining the chorus at the zoo. It was the best way possible to start the day.

  “While the man that killed my lynx (and many others) thinks it came out of a menagerie, and the naturalists call it the Canada lynx, and at the White Mountains they call it the Siberian lynx—in each case forgetting, or ignoring, that it belongs here—I call it the Concord lynx.”

  There were no lynxes in Massachusetts now.

  But the Rock Creek hominid persisted. Oooop! One could follow Rock Creek from the Potomac all the way up to the zoo, with a few little detours. North of that came the beaver pond, and then Site 21. Back out to Connecticut, to an early dinner, pay with cash on the check, big tip, so easy; off again into the park.

  There he ran into Spencer and Robert and Robin, as planned; hugs all around. They were an affectionate group. Sling the friz, running and hooting through the dim yellow world, quickly working up a sweat. The flight of startled deer, their eponymous tails. Stand around afterward, feeling the blood bump through the body.

  The autumn colors in Rock Creek were not like those in New England, they were more muted, more various—not Norman Rockwell, but Cezanne—or, as Diane suggested when Frank put it that way to her, Vuillard.

  Vuillard? he asked.

  She took him on a lunch break back to the Mellon room at the National Gallery. Eating hot dogs sitting on the steps, and then going in to examine the subtle little mud-toned canvases of Vuillard. Wandering side by side, arms bumping, heads together. Was that tan or umber or what. Imagine his palette at the end of the day. Like something the cat threw up.

  She too was affectionate. She took his arm to propel him along. “So how does your head feel today?” she would ask.

  “About the same as yesterday.”

  She squeezed his arm. “I don’t ask every day. Are you still feeling better?”

  “I am. You know, Yann’s doing some amazing things out there in San Diego.” It probably sounded like a change of subject, but it wasn’t.

  “Yeah, like what?”

  “Well, I think they’ve worked out how
to get their DNA modifications into human bodies. The insertion problem may have been solved, and if that happens, all kinds of things might follow. Gene therapies, you know.”

  “Wow. Nice to think that something’s going right.”

  “Indeed.”

  “It would be ironic to think that just as we were inventing real health care we burned the planet down instead.”

  He laughed.

  “Don’t laugh or I’ll bleed on you,” she said dourly, quoting him from the time of his accident. She too had lost someone young, he remembered; her husband had died of cancer in what must have been his forties or fifties. “So,” she persisted, “have you got the feeling in your nose back?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe they’ll learn to regrow nerves.”

  “I think they may. There are some angles converging on that one.”

  “Cool.” She sighed.

  “I’ve gotta get back,” Frank said. “I’ve got a call time in with Anna, to talk about coordinating all her Fix-it agencies into the mission architecture, you should drop in on that.”

  “Okay I will.” And as they started back: “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  Mostly he left the VW van in a driveway behind the feral potluck house on Linnean. If he drove it at all, mostly out to the farm, he checked it thoroughly first. Dry cleaning, Edgardo called it. It always proved free of all chips, tags, and transponders. Easy to believe when you looked at it: VW vans as a class were getting kind of old and skanky. But what a fine house. And sitting in the curved vinyl seat at night, reading his laptop on the curved little table, Thoreau seemed to second the thought:

  In those days when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the workmen locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get him such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and shut the lid and hook it, and so have freedom in his mind, and in his soul be free. This did not seem the worst alternative, nor by any means a despicable resource. I should not be in so bad a box as many a man is in now.

  He had understood entirely. Put such a box in a tree, and you had your treetop view as well. Put the box in a book and you had Walden. Put the box on wheels and you had your VW van. Frank printed the passage out and stuck it on the wall the next time he was at the fregan potluck. They too had found the key. He ate with them about three nights a week, all over Northwest, in house after house. There were feral subcultures: there was a farmers’ market wing, and a hunters’ crowd, and dumpster purists, and many other ways of going feral in the city.

  At work Frank was making wonderful strides with the guy from OMB who was administering the Fix-it program that Anna had rediscovered. His name too was Henry, and he worked with Roy and Andrea and the rest of the White House brain trust. Right now, he and Frank were teaming up on the clean-energy part of the mission architecture. The Navy had made an agreement with the Navajo nation to build and run a prototype nuclear power plant that would reuse fuel rods and was overengineered for safety. Meanwhile Southern California Edison had agreed to build a dozen more Stirling heat engine solar-power generators, for themselves and other energy companies around the American West, and for some federal plants that were going to be built on BLM land, using a federal grant program. SCE had also won the contract to build the first big generation of fully clean coal plants, which would capture both the particulates and the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on firing, so that all they would be releasing from the pipe was steam. The first plants were to be built in Oklahoma, and the CO2 collected in the process was to be injected into nearby depleted oil wells. Oil wells nearby that were still working would look to see if they got any uptick in pressure differentials, making for a complete systems test.

  “Sweet,” the OMB Henry commented. He was about thirty, it seemed to Frank, utterly fresh and determined. He was unfazed by the past, even unaware of it. The defeats and obstructions, the nightmarish beginning to the century, so balked and stupidified; none of that meant a thing to him. And Washington had hundreds of these kids ready to rip. The world was full of them. He said, “That’s a good big subunit of the whole mission architecture, up and running.”

  “True,” Frank said. “I think the question now is how quick we can ramp production up to what we need.”

  “I wonder how much investment capital is out there. Or whether trained labor will be the real shortage.”

  “I guess we’ll find out.”

  “That’s a good thought.” And young Henry grinned.

  Evening in the park, and Frank buzzed Spencer and joined him and Robin and Robert at a new fregan house. East, into a neighborhood he had never been in before, a kind of border between gentrification and urban decay, in which burned or boarded-up buildings stood mutely between renovated towers guarded by private security people. An awkward mix it seemed, and yet once inside the boarded-up shell of a brownstone, it proved to be as sheltered from the public life of the city as any other place. Home was where the food was.

  Same crowd as always, a mix of young and old. Neo-hippie and postpunk. Some new thing that Frank couldn’t name with a media label. The fregan way. Mix of races, ethnicities, modes of operation. A potluck indeed. It was like this every night in so many different places around Northwest. What was happening in Washington, D.C.? What was happening anywhere else, everywhere else? No one could be sure. The media was a concocted product, reporting only a small fraction of the culture. What would they do for a sense of the zeitgeist when the culture had fractalized and the media become not a mirror, but one artifact among many? Had it ever been any different? Was this somehow new? If people walked away from the old mass culture of mass consumption, and everybody did something homegrown, what would that look like?

  “How many fregan houses are there altogether, do you suppose?” Frank asked Spencer as they sat on the floor over their plates.

  Spencer shrugged. “Lots I guess.”

  “How do you choose which to go to?”

  “Friends spread the word. I generally know by five, or Robert.”

  “Not Robin?”

  “Robin usually just goes where we go. You know Robin. He barely knows what city we’re in.”

  “What planet is this?” Robin asked from behind them.

  “See? He doesn’t want to be distracted with irrelevancies. Anyway, you can always call me.”

  “I only have my FOG phone now,” Frank said. “And even that I’m trying not to use too much. I want to stay off the grid when I’m not at work.”

  “I know,” Spencer said as he chewed, glancing at Frank speculatively. He swallowed. “I should tell you, no one can guarantee this group doesn’t have all the various kinds of informants in it. You know. It’s loose at the edges, and law enforcement is kind of nervous about the feral concept. I’ve heard there are people taking money from the FBI just to make some bucks, and they tell them all sorts of things.”

  “Of course.” Frank looked around. No one looked like an informant.

  Spencer went back to wolfing down his meal. There was a big crowd tonight and there wasn’t going to be quite enough food. At the start of every potluck they had all started to say a little thanksgiving. In most houses, they all said together, “Enough is as good as a feast,” sometimes repeating it three or four times. Maybe that was the third great correlation, enough and happiness. Or maybe it was science and Buddhism. Or compassion and action. No, these were too general. It was still out there.

  Some of Spencer’s friends sat down, and he introduced them to Frank, and Frank leaned forward squinting, repeating their names. He joined their chat about the windy autumn, the park, the cops, feral gossip. Apparently this group was going back over west of Connecticut the next night.

  “Do y
ou ever see the jaguar?” Frank asked them.

  “Yeah, I saw it once I think, but it was at night you know.”

  The young women were happy to have Spencer’s attention. Frank was regarded by them in the same way they regarded the other older single males in the room, meaning a bit distantly if at all.

  Eventually Frank left. His treehouse had been nearby. Long walk down Piney Branch Parkway to his VW van, sleep on that nice mattress, cold breeze flowing down the window at the back of the pop-up.

  Thus the feral life, the most extreme set of habits Frank had lived so far. A life on foot, hand to mouth, among friends and strangers. Maybe this was how people lived, no matter what. He googled to see if any studies had been done to determine how quickly new habits were internalized as a norm. Every Wednesday he went by the dead drop and found his note from the week before. It was disturbing, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to remember what Edgardo had said about that, and trust that he had been conveying to him the actual facts of the situation, rather than merely speculating. He had made it clear enough. Time to refocus on the moment. Ride the wave.

  CUT TO THE CHASE

  Response to response 4:

  Yes, I suppose it was hard to talk about, because it seemed like it broke down in one of two ways, because people were asking: Is it too late or not? And it seemed like this:

  If it isn’t too late, we don’t have to do anything.

  On the other hand, if it is too late, we don’t have to do anything.

  So either way, don’t do anything. That was the problem with that way of putting the question. What we came to realize was that it was a false problem or a question put the wrong way, because there was never going to be a too late. It was always going to stay a question of better or worse. It was more a question of, okay, how fast can we act? How much can we save? Those are the questions we should be asking.