Darwin's Radio

  “This is so normal,” she murmured as Mitch snored lightly. “What we’re doing is so natural and normal, please, God.”

  72

  Seattle, Washington / Washington, D.C.

  May 14

  Kaye drove through Portland while Mitch slept. They crossed the bridge into Washington state, passed through a small rainstorm and then back into bright sun. Kaye chose a turnoff and they ate lunch at a small Mexican restaurant near no town that had a name that they would know. The roads were quiet; it was Sunday.

  They paused to nap for a few minutes in the parking lot and Kaye nestled her head on Mitch’s shoulder. The air was slow and the sun warmed her face and hair. A few birds sang. The clouds moved in orderly ranks from the south and soon covered the sky, but the air stayed warm.

  After their nap, Kaye drove on through Tacoma, and then Mitch drove again, and they continued in to Seattle. Once through the downtown, passing under the highway-straddling convention center, Mitch felt anxious about taking her straight to his apartment.

  “Maybe you’d like to see some of the sights before we settle in,” he said.

  Kaye smiled. “What, your apartment is a mess?”

  “It’s clean,” Mitch said. “It just might not be . . .” He shook his head.

  “Don’t worry. I’m in no mood to be critical. But I’d love to look around.”

  “There’s a place I used to visit a lot when I wasn’t digging . . .”

  Gasworks Park sprawled below a low grassy promontory overlooking Lake Union. The remains of an old gas plant and other factory buildings had been cleaned out and painted bright colors and turned into a public park. The vertical gasworks tanks and decaying walkways and piping had not been painted, but had been fenced in and left to rust.

  Mitch took her by the hand and led her from the parking lot. Kaye thought the park was a little ugly, the grass a little patchy, but for Mitch’s sake, said nothing.

  They sat on the lawn beside the chain-link fence and watched passenger seaplanes landing on Lake Union. A few lone men and women, or women with children, walked to the playground beside the factory buildings. Mitch said the attendance was a little low for a sunny Sunday.

  “People don’t want to congregate,” Kaye said, but even as she spoke, chartered buses were arriving in the parking lot, pulling into spaces marked off by ropes.

  “Something’s up,” Mitch said, craning his neck.

  “Nothing you planned for me?” she asked lightly.

  “Nope,” Mitch said, smiling. “But maybe I don’t remember, after last night.”

  “You say that every night,” Kaye said. She yawned, holding her hand over her mouth, and tracked a sailboat crossing the lake, and then a wind surfer in a wetsuit.

  “Eight buses,” Mitch said. “Curious.”

  Kaye’s period was three days late, and she had been regular since going off the pill, after Saul’s death. This caused a steely kind of concern. When she thought about what they might have started, her teeth ground together. So quickly. Old-fashioned romance. Rolling downhill, gathering speed.

  She had not told Mitch yet, in case it was a false alarm.

  Kaye felt separated from her body when she thought too hard. If she pulled back from the steely concern and just explored her sensations, the natural state of tissues and cells and emotions, she felt fine; it was the context, the implications, the knowing that interfered with simply feeling good and in love.

  Knowing too much and never knowing enough was the problem.

  Normal.

  “Ten buses, whoops, eleven,” Mitch said. “Big damn crowd.” He stroked the side of her neck. “I’m not sure I like this.”

  “It’s your park. I don’t want to move for a while,” Kaye said. “It’s nice.” The sun threw bright patches over the park. The rusty tanks glowed dull orange.

  Dozens of men and women in earth-colored clothes walked in small groups from the buses toward the hill. They seemed in no hurry. Four women carried a wooden ring about a yard wide, and several men helped roll a long pole on a dolly.

  Kaye frowned, then chuckled. “They’re doing something with a yoni and a lingam,” she said.

  Mitch squinted at the procession. “Maybe it’s a giant hoop game,” he said. “Horseshoes or something.”

  “Do you think?” Kaye asked with that familiar and uncritical tone he instantly recognized as no-holds-barred disagreement.

  “No,” he said, smacking his temple with his palm. “How could I have not seen it right away? It’s a yoni and a lingam.”

  “And you an anthropolologist,” she said, lightly doubling the syllables. Kaye got up on her knees and shaded her eyes. “Let’s go see.”

  “What if we’re not invited?”

  “I doubt it’s a closed party,” she said.

  Dicken went though the security check—pat-down, metal detection wand, chemical sniff—and entered the White House through the so-called diplomatic entrance. A young Marine escort immediately took him downstairs to a large meeting room in the basement. The air conditioning was running full blast and the room felt cold as a refrigerator compared to the eighty-five-degree heat and humidity outside.

  Dicken was the first to arrive. Other than the Marine and a steward arranging place settings—bottles of Evian and legal pads and pens—on the long oval conference table, he was alone in the room. He sat in a chair reserved for junior aides at the back. The steward asked him if he’d like something to drink—a Coke or glass of juice. “We’ll have coffee down here in a few minutes.”

  “Coke would be great,” Dicken said.

  “Just fly in?”

  “Drove from Bethesda,” Dicken said.

  “Going to be some miserable weather this afternoon,” the steward said. “Thunderstorms by five, so the weather people say at Andrews. We get the best weather reports here.” He winked and smiled, then left and returned after a few minutes with a Coke and a glass of chopped ice.

  More people began arriving ten minutes later. Dicken recognized the governors of New Mexico, Alabama, and Maryland; they were accompanied by a small group of aides. The room would soon hold the core of the so-called Governors’ Revolt that was raising hell with the Taskforce across the country.

  Augustine was going to have his finest hour, right here in the basement of the White House. He was going to try to convince ten governors, seven from very conservative states, that allowing women access to a complete range of abortion measures was the only humane course of action.

  Dicken doubted the plea would be met with approval, or even polite disagreement.

  Augustine entered some minutes later, accompanied by the White House–Taskforce liaison and the chief of staff. Augustine put his valise on the table and walked over to Dicken, his shoes clicking on the tile floor.

  “Any ammunition?” he asked.

  “A rout,” Dicken said quietly. “None of the health agencies felt we had a chance of taking control again. They feel the president has lost his grip on the issue, too.”

  Augustine’s eyes wrinkled at the edges. His crow’s feet had grown noticeably deeper in the last year, and his hair had grayed. “I suppose they’re going it on their own—grass-roots solutions?”

  “That’s all they see. The AMA and most of the side branches of the NIH have withdrawn their support, tacitly if not overtly.”

  “Well,” Augustine said softly, “we sure as hell don’t have anything to offer to get them back in the fold—yet.” He took a cup of coffee from the steward. “Maybe we should just go home and let everyone get on with it.”

  Augustine turned to look as more governors entered. The governors were followed by Shawbeck and the secretary of Health and Human Services. “Here come the lions, followed by the Christians,” he said. “That’s only as it should be.” Before leaving to sit at the opposite end of the table, in one of the three seats where no tiny flags flew, he said, in a very low voice, “The president’s been talking with Alabama and Maryland for the last two hours,
Christopher. They’ve been arguing with him to delay his decision. I don’t think he wants to. Fifteen thousand pregnant women were murdered in the last six weeks. Fifteen thousand, Christopher.”

  Dicken had seen that figure several times.

  “We should all bend over and get our butts kicked,” Augustine growled.

  Mitch estimated there were at least six hundred people in the crowd moving toward the top of the hill. A few dozen onlookers followed the resolute group with its wooden ring and pillar.

  Kaye took his hand. “Is this a Seattle thing?” she asked, pulling him along. The idea of a fertility ritual intrigued her.

  “Not that I’ve heard of,” Mitch said. Since San Diego, the smell of too many people gave him the willies.

  At the top of the promontory, Kaye and Mitch stood on the edge of a large flat sundial, about thirty feet across. It was made of bas-relief bronze astrological figures, numerals, outstretched human hands, and calligraphic letters showing the four points of the compass. Ceramics, glass, and colored cement completed the circle.

  Mitch showed Kaye how the observer became the gnomon on the dial, standing between parallel lines with the seasons and dates cast into them. It was two o’clock, by her estimation.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Kind of a pagan site, don’t you think?” Mitch nodded, keeping his eye on the advancing crowd.

  Several men and boys flying kites moved out of the way, pulling and winding their strings, as the group climbed the hill. Three women carried the ring, sweating beneath the weight. They lowered it gently to the middle of the sundial. Two men carrying the pillar stood to one side, waiting to set it down.

  Five older women dressed in light yellow robes walked into the circle with hands clasped, smiling with dignity, and surrounded the ring in the center of the compass. The group said not a word.

  Kaye and Mitch descended to the south side of the hill, overlooking Lake Union. Mitch felt a breeze coming from the south and saw a few low banks of cloud moving over downtown Seattle. The air was like wine, clean and sweet, temperature in the low seventies. Cloud shadows swung dramatically over the hill.

  “Too many people,” Mitch told Kaye.

  “Let’s stay and see what they’re up to,” Kaye said.

  The crowd compacted, forming concentric circles, all holding hands. They politely asked Kaye and Mitch and others to move farther down the hill while they completed their ceremony.

  “You’re welcome to watch, from down there,” a plump young woman in a green shift told Kaye. She explicitly ignored Mitch. Her eyes seemed to track right past him, through him.

  The only sound the gathering people made was the rustling of their robes and the motion of their sandaled feet in the grass and over the bas-relief figures of the sundial.

  Mitch shoved his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders.

  The governors were seated at the table, leaning right or left to speak in murmurs with their aides or adjacent colleagues. Shawbeck remained standing, hands clasped in front of him. Augustine had walked around one quarter of the table to speak with the governor of California. Dicken tried to puzzle out the seating arrangements and then realized that someone was following a clever protocol. The governors had been arranged not by seniority, or by influence, but by the geographic distribution of their states. California was on the western side of the table, and the governor of Alabama sat close to the back of the room in the southeastern quadrant. Augustine, Shawbeck, and the secretary sat near where the president would sit.

  That meant something, Dicken surmised. Maybe they were actually going to bite the bullet and recommend that Augustine’s policies be carried out.

  Dicken was not at all sure how he felt about that. He had listened to presentations on the medical cost of taking care of second-stage babies, should any survive for very long; he had also listened to figures showing what it would cost for the United States to lose an entire generation of children.

  The liaison for Health stood by the door. “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.”

  All rose. The governor of Alabama got to his feet more slowly than the others. Dicken saw that his face was damp, presumably from the heat outside. But Augustine had told him that the governor had been in conference with the president for the past two hours.

  A Secret Service agent dressed in a blazer and golf shirt walked past Dicken, glanced at him with that stony precision Dicken had long since become used to. The president entered the room first, tall, with his famous shock of white hair. He seemed fit but a little tired; still, the power of the office swept over Dicken. He was pleased that the president looked in his direction, recognized him, nodded solemnly in passing.

  The governor of Alabama pushed back his chair. The wooden legs groaned on the concrete floor. “Mr. President,” the governor said, too loudly. The president stopped to speak with him, and the governor took two steps forward.

  Two agents glanced at each other and swung about to politely intervene.

  “I love the office and I love our great country, sir,” the governor said, and wrapped the president in his arms, as if delivering a protective bear hug.

  The governor of Florida, standing next to them, grimaced and shook his head in some embarrassment.

  The agents were mere feet away.

  Oh, Dicken thought, nothing more; just a blank and prescient awareness of being suspended in time, a train whistle not yet heard, brakes not yet pressed, arm willed to move but as yet limp by his side.

  He thought perhaps he should get out of the way.

  The blond young man in a black robe wore a green surgical mask and kept his eyes lowered as he advanced up the hill to the compass rose. He was escorted by three women in brown and green, and he carried a small brown cloth bag tied with golden rope. His wispy, almost white hair blew back and forth in the breeze that was quickening on the hill.

  The circles of women and men parted to let them through.

  Mitch watched with a puzzled expression. Kaye stood with arms folded beside him. “What are they up to?” he asked.

  “Some sort of ceremony,” Kaye said.

  “Fertility?”

  “Why not?”

  Mitch mulled this over. “Atonement,” he said. “There are more women than men.”

  “About three to one,” Kaye said.

  “Most of the men are older.”

  “Q-Tips,” Kaye said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what young women call men who are old enough to be their fathers,” Kaye said. “Like the president.”

  “That’s insulting,” Mitch said.

  “It’s true,” Kaye said. “Don’t blame me.”

  The young man was hidden from their view as the crowd closed again.

  A large burning hand picked up Christopher Dicken and carried him to the back of the wall. It shattered his eardrums and collapsed his chest. Then the hand pulled back and he slumped to the floor. His eyes flickered open. He saw flames rush along the crushed ceiling in concentric waves, tiles falling through the flames. He was covered with blood and bits of flesh. White smoke and heat stung his eyes, and he shut them. He could not breathe, could not hear, could not move.

  The chanting began low and droning. “Let’s go,” Mitch told Kaye.

  She looked back at the crowd. Now something seemed wrong to her, as well. The hair on her neck rose. “All right,” she said.

  They circled on a walkway and turned to walk down the north side of the hill. They passed a man and his son, five or six years old, the son carrying a kite in his small hands. The boy smiled at Kaye and Mitch. Kaye looked at the boy’s elegant almond eyes, his long close-shaven head so Egyptian, like a beautiful and ancient ebony statue brought to life, and she thought, What a beautiful and normal child. What a beautiful little boy.

  She was reminded of the young girl standing by the side of the street in Gordi, as the UN caravan left the town; so different in appearance, yet provoking such similar
thoughts.

  She took Mitch’s hand in hers just as the sirens began. They looked north toward the parking lot, and saw five police cars skidding to a halt, doors flung open, officers emerging, running through the parked cars and across the grass, up the hill.

  “Look,” Mitch said, and pointed at a lone middle-aged man dressed in shorts and a sweatshirt, talking on a cellular phone. The man looked scared.

  “What in hell?” Kaye asked.

  The droning prayer had strengthened. Three officers rushed past Kaye and Mitch, guns still holstered, but one had pulled out his baton. They pushed through the outer circles of the crowd on the top of the hill.

  Women shrieked abuse at them. They fought with the officers, shoving, kicking, scratching, trying to push them back.

  Kaye could not believe what she was seeing or hearing. Two women jumped on one of the men, shouting obscenities.

  The officer with the baton began to use it to protect his fellows. Kaye heard the stomach-twisting chunk of weighted plastic on flesh and bone.

  Kaye started back up the hill, but Mitch grabbed her arm.

  More officers plowed into the crowd, batons swinging. The chanting stopped. The crowd seemed to lose all cohesion. Women in robes broke away, hands clutched to their faces in anger and fear, screaming, crying, their voices high and frantic. Some of the robed women collapsed and pounded the scruffy yellow grass with their fists. Spittle dribbled from their mouths.

  A police van pushed over the curb and over the grass, engine roaring. Two female officers joined in the rout.

  Mitch backed Kaye off the mound, and they came to the bottom, facing uphill to keep an eye on the crowd still massed around the sundial. Two officers pushed out of this assembly with the young man in black. Red dripping slashes marked his neck and hands. A woman officer called for an ambulance on her walkie-talkie. She passed within yards of Mitch and Kaye, face white and lips red with anger.