"Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)X Broader ImpactsCharlie, awakened by the sound of a loud alarm, leapt to his feet and stood next to his bed, hands thrown out like a nineteenth-century boxer. “What?” he shouted at the loud noise. It was not an alarm. It was Joe in the room, wailing. He stared at his father amazed. “Ba.” “Jesus, Joe.” The itchiness began to burn across Charlie’s chest and arms. He had tossed and turned in misery most of the night, as he had every night since encountering the poison ivy. He had probably fallen asleep only an hour or two before. “What time is it. Joe, it’s not even seven! Don’t Joe approached and tapped his leg, staring peacefully at him. “Mo Da. Wa ba.” “Wow Joe. Really good! Say, I’ll get your bottle warmed up right away! Very good! Hey listen, have you pooped in your diaper yet? You might want to pull it down and sit on “Ga Da.” Joe trundled off toward the bathroom. Charlie, amazed, padded after Joe and descended the stairs as gently as he could, hoping not to stimulate his itches. In the kitchen the air was delightfully cool and silky. Nick was there reading a book. Without looking up he said, “I want to go down to the park and play.” “I thought you had homework to do.” “Well, sort of. But I want to play.” “Why don’t you do your homework first and then play, that way when you play you’ll be able to really enjoy it.” Nick cocked his head. “That’s true. Okay, I’ll go do my homework first.” He slipped out, book under his arm. “Oh, and take your shoes up to your room while you’re on your way.” “Sure Dad.” Charlie stared at his reflection in the side of the stove hood. His eyes were round. “Hmm,” he said. He got Joe’s bottle in its pot, stuck an earphone in his left ear. “Phone, give me Phil… Hello, Phil, look I wanted to catch you while the thought was fresh, I was thinking that if only we tried to introduce the Chinese aerosols bill again, then we could catch the whole air problem at a kind of fulcrum point and either start a process that would finish with the coal plants here on the East Coast, or else it would serve as a stalking horse, see what I mean?” “So you’re saying we go after the Chinese again?” “Well yeah, but as part of your whole package of efforts.” “And then it either works or it doesn’t work, but gives us some leverage we can use elsewhere? Hmm, good idea Charlie, I’d forgotten that bill, but it was a good one. I’ll give that a try. Call Roy and tell him to get it ready.” “Sure Phil, consider it done.” Charlie took the bottle out of the pot and dried it. Joe appeared in the door, naked, holding up his diaper for Charlie’s inspection. “Wow Joe, very good! You pooped in your toilet? Very, very good, here’s your bottle all ready, what a perfect kind of Pavlovian reward.” Joe snatched the bottle from Charlie’s hand and waddled off, a length of toilet paper trailing behind him, one end stuck between the halves of his butt. Holy shit, Charlie thought. So to speak. He called up Roy and told him Phil had authorized the reintroduction of the Chinese bill. Roy was incredulous. “What do you mean, we went down big-time on that, it was a joke then and it would be worse now!” “No not so, it lost bad but that was good, we got lots of credit for it that we deployed elsewhere, and it’ll happen the same way when we do it again because it’s “Yes of course obviously that’s not the point—” “Not the point, have we gotten so jaded that being right is no longer relevant?” “No of course not, but that’s not the point either, it’s like playing a chess game, each move is just a move in the larger game, you know?” “Yes I do know because that’s my analogy, but that’s my point, this is a good move, this checks them, they have to give up a queen to stop from being checkmated.” “You really think it’s that much leverage? Why?” “Because Winston has such ties to Chinese industry, and he can’t defend that very well to his hard-core constituency, Christian “Well yeah, of course. You said Phil okayed it already?” “Yes he did.” “Okay, that’s good enough for me.” Charlie got off and did a little dance in the kitchen, circling out into the living room, where Joe was sitting on the floor trying to get back into his diaper. Both adhesive tags had torn loose. “Good try Joe, here let me help you.” “Okay Da.” Joe held out the diaper. “Hmm,” Charlie said, suddenly suspicious. He called up Anna and got her. “Hey snooks, how are you, yeah I’m just calling to say I love you and to suggest that we get tickets to fly to Jamaica, we’ll find some kind of kid care and go down there just by ourselves, we’ll rent a whole beach to ourselves and spend a week down there or maybe two, it would be good for us.” “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. 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 “‘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 “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 “True. But he takes the long view. Later 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 “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 “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. 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: “Holy shit—” “Holy moly.” Charlie read on, face just inches from the screen, which was now also the dim room’s lamp. 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.” “The what?” “Are you at the office?” “Yeah.” “Is anyone else there with you?” “Sure.” “Are they just sitting there working?” Charlie peered out of his carrel door to look. In fact his floor sounded empty. It sounded as if everyone was gathered down in Evelyn’s office. “I’ll go check and call you back,” he said to Anna. “Okay call me when you find out what’s happening!” “I will. Thanks for tipping me. Hey before I go, did you know that Khembalung is a kind of reincarnation of Shambhala?” “What do you mean?” “Just what I said. Shambhala, the hidden magical city—” “Yes I know—” “—well it’s a kind of movable feast, apparently. Whenever it’s discovered, or the time is right, it moves on to a new spot. They recently found the ruins of the original one in Kashgar, did you know that?” “No.” “Apparently they did. It was like finding Troy, or the Atlantis place on Santorini. But Shambhala didn’t end in Kashgar, it moved. First to Tibet, then to a valley in east Nepal or west Bhutan, a valley called Khembalung. I suppose when the Chinese conquered Tibet they had to move it down to that island.” “How do you know this?” “I just read it online.” “Charlie that’s very nice, but right now go find out what’s going on down there in your office! I think you’re in the area that may get flooded!” “Okay, I will. But look”—walking down the hall now—“did Drepung ever talk to you about how they figure out who their reincarnated lamas have been reborn as?” “No! Go check on your office!” “Okay I am, but look honey, I want you to talk to him about that. I’m remembering that first dinner when the old man was playing games with Joe and his blocks, and Sucandra didn’t like it.” “So?” “So I just want to be sure that nothing’s going on there! This is serious, honey, I’m serious. Those folks looking for the new Panchen Lama got some poor little kid in terrible trouble a few years ago, and I don’t want any part of anything like that.” “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about Charlie, but let’s talk about it later. Just find out what’s going on there.” “Okay okay, but remember.” “I will!” “Okay. Call you back in a second.” He went into Evelyn’s office and saw people jammed around the south window, with another group around a TV set on a desk. “Look at this,” Andrea said to him, gesturing at the TV screen. “Is that our door camera?” Charlie exclaimed, recognizing the view down Constitution. “That’s our door camera!” “That’s right.” “My God!” Charlie went to the window and stood on his tiptoes to see past people. The Mall was covered by water. The streets beyond were flooded. Constitution was floored by water that looked to be at least two feet deep, maybe deeper. “Incredible isn’t it.” “Shit!” “Look at that.” “Will you look at that!” “Why didn’t you guys call me?” Charlie cried, shocked by the view. “Forgot you were here,” someone said. “You’re never here.” Andrea added, “It just came up in the last half hour, or even less. It happened all at once, it seemed like. I was watching.” Her voice quivered. “It was like a hard downburst, and the raindrops didn’t have anywhere to go, they were splashing into a big puddle everywhere, and then it was there, what you see.” “A big puddle everywhere.” Constitution Avenue looked like the Grand Canal in Venice. Beyond it the Mall was like a rainbeaten lake. Water sheeted equally over streets, sidewalks and lawns. Charlie recalled the shock he had felt many years before, leaving the Venice train station and seeing the canal right there outside the door. A city floored with water. Here it was quite shallow, of course. But the front steps of all the buildings came down into an expanse of brown water, and the water was all at one level, as with any other lake or sea. Brown-blue, blue-brown, brown-gray, brown, gray, dirty white—drab urban tints all. The rain pocked it into an infinity of rings and bounding droplets, and gusts of wind tore cats’ paws across it. Charlie maneuvered closer to the window as people left it. It seemed to him then that the water in the distance was flowing gently toward them; for a moment it looked (and even felt) as if their building had cast anchor and was steaming westward. Charlie felt a lurch in his stomach, put his hand to the windowsill to keep his balance. “Shit, I should get home,” he said. “How are you going to do that?” “We’ve been advised to stay put,” Evelyn said. “You’re kidding.” “No. I mean, take a look. It could be dangerous out there right now. That’s nothing to mess with—look at that!” A little electric car floated or rather was dragged down the street, already tipped on its side. “You could get knocked off your feet.” “Jesus.” “Yeah.” Charlie wasn’t quite convinced, but he didn’t want to argue. The water was definitely a couple of feet deep, and the rain was shattering its surface. If nothing else, it was too weird to go out. “How extensive is it?” he asked. Evelyn switched to a local news channel, where a very cheerful woman was saying that a big tidal surge had been predicted, because the tides were at the height of an eleven-year cycle. She went on to say that this tide was cresting higher than it would have normally because Tropical Storm Sandy’s surge was now pushing up Chesapeake Bay. The combined tidal and storm surges were moving up the Potomac toward Washington, losing height and momentum all the while, but impeding the outflow of the river, which had a watershed of “fourteen thousand square miles” as Charlie had heard in the Iranian deli—a watershed which had that morning experienced record-shattering rainfall. In the last four hours ten inches of rain had fallen in several widely separated parts of the watershed, and now all that was pouring downstream and encountering the tidal bore, right in the metropolitan area. The four inches of rain that had fallen on Washington during its midday squall, while spectacular in itself, had only added to the larger problem; for the moment, there was nowhere for any of the water to go. All this the reporter explained with a happy smile. Outside, the rain was falling no more violently than during many a summer evening’s shower. But it was coming down steadily, and striking water when it hit. “Amazing,” Andrea said. “I hope this washes the International Monetary Fund away.” This remark opened the floodgates, so to speak, on a loud listing of all the buildings and agencies the people in the room most wanted to see wiped off the face of the earth. Someone shouted “the Capitol,” but of course it was located on its hill to the east of them, high ground that stayed high for a good distance to the east before dipping down to the Anacostia. The people up there probably wouldn’t even get stranded, as there should be a strip of high ground running to the east and north. Unlike them, situated below the Capitol by about forty vertical feet: “We’re here for a while.” “The trains will be stopped for sure.” “What about the Metro? Oh my God.” “I’ve gotta call home.” Several people said this at once, Charlie among them. People scattered to their desks and their phones. Charlie said, “Phone, get me Anna.” He got a quick reply: “All circuits are busy. Please try again.” This was a recording he hadn’t heard in many years, and it gave him a bad start. Of course it would happen now if at any time, everyone would be trying to call someone, and lines would be down. But what if it stayed like that for hours—or days? Or even longer? It was a sickening thought; he felt hot, and the itchiness blazed anew across his broken skin. He was almost overcome by something like dizziness, as if some invisible limb were being threatened with immediate amputation—his sixth sense, in effect, which was his link to Anna. All of a sudden he understood how completely he took his state of permanent communication with her for granted. They talked a dozen times a day, and he relied on those talks to know what he was doing, sometimes literally. Now he was cut off from her. Judging by the voices in the offices, no one’s connection was working. They regathered; had anyone gotten an open line? No. Was there an emergency phone system they could tap into? No. There was, however, e-mail. Everyone sat down at their keyboards to type out messages home, and for a while it was like an office of secretaries or telegraph operators. After that there was nothing to do but watch screens, or look out windows. They did that, milling about restlessly, saying the same things over and over, trying the phones, typing, looking out the windows or checking out the channels and sites. The usual news channels’ helicopter shots and all other overhead views lower than satellite level were impossible in the violence of the storm, but almost every channel had cobbled together or transferred direct images from various cameras around town, and one of the weather stations was flying drone camera balloons and blimps into the storm and showing whatever it was they got, mostly swirling gray clouds, but also astonishing shots of the surrounding countryside as vast tree- or roof-studded lakes. One camera on top of the Washington Monument gave a splendid view of the extent of the flooding around the Mall, truly breathtaking. The Potomac had almost overrun Roosevelt Island, and spilled over its banks until it disappeared into the huge lake it was forming, thus onto the Mall and all the way across it, up to the steps of the White House and the Capitol, both on little knolls, the Capitol’s well higher. The entirety of the little Southwest district was floored by water, though its big buildings stood clear; the broad valley of the Anacostia looked like a reservoir. The city south of Pennsylvania Avenue was a building-studded lake. And not just there. The flood had filled Rock Creek to the top of its deep but narrow ravine, and now water was pouring over at the sharp bends the gorge took while dropping through the city to the Potomac. Cameras on the bridges at M Street caught the awesome sight of the creek roaring around its final turn west, upstream from M Street, and pouring over Francis Junior High School and straight south on 23rd Street into Foggy Bottom, joining the lake covering the Mall. Then on to a different channel, a different camera. The Watergate Building was indeed a curving water gate, like a remnant portion of a dam. The wave-tossed spate of the Potomac poured around its big bend looking as if it could knock the building down. Likewise the Kennedy Center just south of it. The Lincoln Memorial, despite its pedestal mound, appeared to be flooded up to about Lincoln’s feet. Across the Potomac the water was going to inundate the lower levels of Arlington National Cemetery. Reagan Airport was completely gone. “Unbelievable.” Charlie went back to the view out their window. The water was still there. A voice on the TV was saying something about a million acre-feet of water converging in the metropolitan area, partially blocked in its flow downstream by the high tide. With more rain predicted. Out the window Charlie saw that people were already taking to the streets around them in small watercraft, despite the wind and drizzle. Zodiacs, kayaks, a waterski boat, canoes, rowboats; he saw examples of them all. Then as the evening wore on, and the dim light left the air below the black clouds, the rain returned with its earlier intensity. It poured down in a way that surely made it dangerous to be on the water. Most of the small craft had appeared to be occupied by men who it did not seem had any good reason to be out there. Out for a lark—thrill-seekers, already! “It looks like Venice,” Andrea said, echoing Charlie’s earlier thought. “I wonder what it would be like if it were like this all the time.” “Maybe we’ll get to find out.” “How high above sea level are we here?” No one knew, but Evelyn quickly found and clicked a topographical map to her screen. They jammed around her to look at it, or to get the address to bring it up on their own screens. “Look at that.” “Ten feet above sea level? Can that be true?” “That’s why they call it the Tidal Basin.” “But isn’t the ocean like what, fifty miles away? A hundred?” “Ninety miles downstream to Chesapeake Bay,” Evelyn said. “I wonder if the Metro has flooded.” “How could it not?” “True. I suppose it must have in some places.” “And if in some places, wouldn’t it spread?” “Well, there are higher and lower sections. Seems like the lower ones would for sure. And anywhere the entries are flooded.” “Well, yes.” “Wow. What a mess.” “Shit, I got here by Metro.” Charlie said, “Me too.” They thought about that for a while. Taxis weren’t going to be running either. “I wonder how long it takes to walk home.” But then again, Rock Creek ran between the Mall and Bethesda. Hours passed. Charlie checked his e-mail frequently, and finally there was a note from Anna: Charlie took a deep breath, feeling greatly reassured. When the topo map had come up he had checked Bethesda first, and found that the border of the District and Maryland at Wisconsin Avenue was some two hundred and fifty feet above sea level. And Rock Creek was well to the east of it. Little Falls Creek was closer, but far enough to the west not to be a concern, he hoped. Of course Wisconsin Avenue itself was probably a shallow stream of sorts now, running down into Georgetown—and wouldn’t it be great if snobbish little Georgetown got some of this, but wouldn’t you know it, it was on a rise overlooking the river, in the usual correlation of money and elevation. Higher than the Capitol by a good deal. It was always that way; the poor people lived down in the flats, as witness the part of Southeast in the valley of the Anacostia River, now flooded from one side to the other. It continued to rain. The phone connections stayed busy and no calls got through. People in Phil’s office watched the TV, stretched out on couches, or even lay down to catch some sleep on chair cushions lined on the floor. Outside the wind abated, rose again, dropped. Rain fell all the while. All the TV stations chattered on caffeinistically, talking to the emptied darkened rooms. It was strange to see how they were directly involved in an obviously historical moment, right in the middle of it in fact, and yet they too were watching it on TV. Charlie could not sleep, but wandered the halls of the big building. He visited with the security team at the front doors, who had been using rolls of Department of Homeland Security gas-attack tape to try to waterproof the bottom halves of all the doors. Nevertheless the ground floor was getting soggy, and the basement even worse, though clearly the seal was fairly good, as the basement was by no means filled to the ceiling. Apparently over in the Smithsonian buildings there were hundreds of people moving stuff upstairs from variously flooding situations. People in their building mostly worked at screens or on laptops, though now some reported that they were having trouble getting online. If the Internet went down they would be completely out of touch. Finally Charlie got itchy enough from his walking, and tired enough from his already acute lack of sleep, to go back to Phil’s office and lie down on a couch and try to sleep. Gingerly he rested his fiery side on some couch cushions. “Owwwwww.” The pain made him want to weep, and all of a sudden he wanted to be home so badly that he couldn’t think about it. He moaned to think of Anna and the boys. He needed to be with them; he was not himself here, cut off from them. This was what it felt like to be in an emergency of this particular kind—scarcely able to believe it, but aware nevertheless that bad things could happen. The itching tortured him. He thought it would keep him from getting to sleep; but he was so tired that after a period of weird hypnagogic tossing and turning, during which the memory of the flood kept recurring to him like a bad dream that he was relieved to find was not true, he drifted off. ACROSS THE great river it was different. Frank was at NSF when the storm got bad. He had gotten authorization from Diane to convene a new committee to report to the Board of Directors; his acceptance of the assignment had triggered a whole wave of communications to formalize his return to NSF for another year. His department at UCSD would be fine with it; it was good for them to have people working at NSF. Now he was sitting at his screen, Googling around, and for some reason he had brought up the website for Small Delivery Systems, just to look. While tapping through its pages he had come upon a list of publications by the company’s scientists; this was often the best way to tell what a company was up to. And almost instantly his eye picked out one coauthored by Dr. P. L. Emory, CEO of the company, and Dr. F. Taolini. Quickly he typed “consultants” into the search engine, and up came the company’s page listing them. And there she was: Dr. Francesca Taolini, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Biocomputational Studies. “Well I’ll be damned.” He sat back, thinking it over. Taolini had liked Pierzinski’s proposal; she had rated it “Very Good,” and argued in favor of funding it, persuasively enough that at the time it had given him a little scare. She had seen its potential… Then Kenzo called up, raving about the storm and the flood, and Frank joined everyone else in the building in watching the TV news and the NOAA website, trying to get a sense of how serious things were. It became clear that things were serious indeed when one channel showed Rock Creek overflowing its banks and running deep down the streets toward Foggy Bottom; then the screen shifted the image to Foggy Bottom, waist-deep everywhere, and then came images from the inundated-to-the-rooftops Southwest district, including the classically pillared War College Building at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia, sticking out of the water like a temple of Atlantis. The Jefferson Memorial was much the same. Rain-lashed rooftop cameras all over the city transmitted more images of the flood, and Frank stared, fascinated; the city was a lake. The climate guys on the ninth floor were already posting topographical map projections with the flood peaking at various heights. If the surge got to twenty feet above sea level at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia, which Kenzo thought was a reasonable projection given the tidal bore and all, the new shore along this contour line would run roughly from the Capitol up Pennsylvania Avenue to where it crossed Rock Creek. That meant the Capitol on its hill, and the White House on its lower rise, would probably both be spared; but everything to the south and west of them was underwater already, as the videos confirmed. Upstream monitoring stations showed that the peak of the flood had not yet arrived. “Everything has combined!” Kenzo exclaimed over the phone. “It’s all coming together!” His usual curatorial tone had shifted to that of an impresario—the Master of Disaster—or even to an almost parental pride. He was as excited as Frank had ever heard him. “Could this be from the Atlantic stall?” Frank asked. “Oh no, very doubtful. This is separate I think, a collisionary storm. Although the stall might bring more storms like this. Windier and colder. This is what that will be like!” “Jesus…Can you tell me what’s going on on the Virginia side?” There would be no way to cross the Potomac until the storm was over. “Are people working anywhere around here?” “They’re sandbagging down at Arlington Cemetery,” Kenzo said. “There’s video on channel 44. It’s got a call out for volunteers.” “Really!” Frank was off. He took the stairs to the basement, to be sure he didn’t get caught in an elevator, and drove his car up onto the street. It was awash in places, but only to a depth of a few inches. Possibly this would soon get worse; runoff wouldn’t work when the river was flowing back up the drainpipes. But for now he was okay to get to the river. As he turned right and stopped for the light, he saw the Starbucks people out on the sidewalk, passing out bags of food and cups of coffee to the cars in front of him. Frank opened his window as one of them approached, and the employee passed in a bag of pastries, then handed him a paper cup of coffee. “Thanks!” Frank shouted. “You guys should take over emergency services!” “We already did. You go and get yourself out of here.” She waved him on. Frank drove east toward the river, laughing as he downed the pastry. Like everyone else still on the road, he plowed through the water at about five miles an hour. Fire trucks passed through at a faster clip, leaving big wakes. As he crossed one intersection Frank spotted a trio of men ducking behind a building, carrying something. Could there be looters? Would anyone really do it? How sad to think that there were people so stuck in always defect mode that they couldn’t get out of it, even when a chance came for everything to change. What a waste of an opportunity! Eventually he came to a roadblock and parked, following the directions of a man in an orange vest. It was a moment of hard rain. In the distance he could see people passing sandbags down a line, just to the east of the U.S. Marines’ Memorial. He hustled over to join them. From where he worked he could often see the Potomac, pouring down the Boundary Channel between the mainland and Columbia Island, tearing away the bridges and the marinas and threatening the low-lying parts of Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people were working around him, carrying small sandbags that looked like fifty-pound cement bags, and no doubt were about that heavy. Some big guys were lifting them off truck beds and passing them to people who passed them down lines, or carried them over shoulders, to near or far sections of a sandbag wall under the Virginia end of Memorial Bridge, where firemen were directing construction. The noise of the river and the rain together made it hard to hear. People shouted to one another, sharing instructions and news. The airport was drowned, old Alexandria flooded, the Anacostia Valley filled for miles. The Mall a lake, of course. Frank nodded at anything said his way, not bothering to understand, and worked like a dervish. It was very satisfying. He felt deeply happy, and looking around he could see that everyone else was happy too. That’s what happens, he thought, watching people carry limp sandbags like coolies out of an old Chinese painting. It takes something like this to free people to be always generous. Late in the day he stood on their sandbag wall. It gave him a good view over the flood. The wind had died down, but the rain was falling almost as hard as ever. In some moments it seemed there was more water in the air than air. His team had been given a break by a sudden end to the supply of sandbags. His back was stiff, and he stretched himself in circles, like the trunks of the trees had been doing all day. The wind had shifted frequently, and had included short hard blasts from the west or north, vicious slaps like microbursting downdrafts. But now there was some kind of aerial truce. Then the rain too relented. It became a very light drizzle. Over the foamy water in the Boundary Channel he could now see far across the Potomac proper: a swirling brown plate, sheeting as far as he could see to the east. The Washington Monument was a dim obelisk on a watery horizon. The Lincoln Memorial and Kennedy Center were both islands in the stream. Black clouds formed a low ceiling above them, and between the two, water and cloud, he could feel the air being smashed this way and that. Despite the disorderly gusts he was still warm from his exertions, wet but warm, with only his hands and ears slightly nipped by the wind. He stood there flexing his spine, feeling the tired muscles of his lower back. A powerboat growled slowly up the Boundary Channel below them. Frank watched it pass, wondering how shallow its draft was; it was twenty-five or maybe even thirty feet long, a rescue boat like a sleek cabin cruiser, hull painted a shade of green that made it almost invisible. The illuminated cockpit shed its light on a person standing upright at the stern, looking like one of the weird sisters in the movie This person looked over at the sandbag levee, and Frank saw that it was the woman from the elevator in Bethesda. Shocked, he put his hands to his mouth and shouted, “HEY!” as loud as he could, emptying his lungs all at once. No sign in the roar of flood and rain that she had heard him. Nor did she appear to see him waving. As the boat began to disappear around a bend in the channel, Frank spotted white lettering on its stern—GCX88A—then it was gone. Its wake had already splashed the side of the levee and roiled away. Frank pulled his phone out of his windbreaker pocket, shoved it in his ear, then tapped the button for NSF’s climate office. Luckily it was Kenzo who picked up. “Kenzo, it’s Frank—listen, write down this sequence, it’s very important, please? GCX88A, have you got that? Read it back. GCX88A. Great. Great. Wow. Okay, listen Kenzo, that’s a boat’s number, it was on the stern of a powerboat about twenty-six feet long. I couldn’t tell if it was public or private, I suspect public, but I need to know whose it is. Can you find that out for me? I’m out in the rain and can’t see my phonepad well enough to Google it.” “I can try,” Kenzo said. “Here, let me…well, it looks like the boat belongs to the marina on Roosevelt Island.” “That would make sense. Is there a phone number for it?” “Let’s see—that should be in the Coast Guard records. Wait, they’re not open files. Hold a minute, please.” Kenzo loved these little problems. Frank waited, trying not to hold his breath. Another instinctive act. As he waited he tried to etch the woman’s face again on his mind, thinking he might be able to get a portrait program to draw something like what he was remembering. She had looked serious and remote, like one of the Fates. “Yeah, Frank, here it is. Do you want me to call it and pass you along?” “Yes please, but write it down for me too.” “Okay, I’ll pass you over and get off. I have to get back to it here.” “Thanks Kenzo, thanks a lot.” Frank listened, sticking a finger in his other ear. There was a pause, a ring. The ring had a rapid pulse and an insistent edge, as if it were designed to compete with the sounds of an inboard engine on a boat. Three rings, four, five; if an answering machine message came on, what would he say? “Hello?” It was her voice. “Hello?” she said again. He had to say something or she would hang up. “Hi,” he said. “Hi, this is me.” There was a static-filled silence. “We were stuck in that elevator together in Bethesda.” “Oh my God.” Another silence. Frank let her assimilate it. He had no idea what to say. It seemed like the ball was in her court, and yet as the silence went on, a fear grew in him. “Don’t hang up,” he said, surprising himself. “I just saw your boat go by, I’m here on the levee at the back of the Davis Highway. I called information and got your boat’s number. I know you didn’t want—I mean, I tried to find you afterward, but I couldn’t, and I could tell that you didn’t—that you didn’t want to be found. So I figured I would leave it at that, I really did.” He could hear himself lying and added hastily, “I didn’t want to, but I didn’t see what else I could do. So when I saw you just now, I called a friend who got me the boat’s number. I mean how could I not, when I saw you like that.” “I know,” she said. He breathed in. He felt himself filling up, his back straightening. Something in the way she said “I know” brought it all back again. The way she had made it a bond between them. After a time he said, “I wanted to find you again. I thought that our time in the elevator, I thought it was…” “I know.” His skin warmed. It was like a kind of St. Elmo’s fire running over him, he’d never felt anything like it. “But—” she said, and he learned another new feeling; dread clutched him under the ribs. He waited as for a blow to fall. The silence went on. An isolated freshet of rain pelted down, cleared, and then he could see across the wind-lashed Potomac again. A huge rushing watery world, awesome and dreamlike. “Give me your number,” her voice said in his ear. “What?” “Give me your phone number,” she said again. He gave her his number, then added, “My name is Frank Vanderwal.” “Frank Vanderwal,” she said, then repeated the number. “That’s it.” “Now give me some time,” she said. “I don’t know how long.” And the connection went dead. The second day of the storm passed as a kind of suspended moment, everything continuing as it had the day before, everyone in the area living through it, enduring, waiting for conditions to change. The rain was not as torrential, but so much of it had fallen in the previous twenty-four hours that it was still sheeting off the land into the flooded areas and keeping them flooded. The clouds continued to crash together overhead, and the tides were still higher than normal, so that the whole Piedmont region surrounding Chesapeake Bay was inundated. Except for immediate acts of a lifesaving nature, nothing could be done except to endure. All transport was drowned. The phones remained down, and power losses left hundreds of thousands without electricity. Escapes from drowning took precedence even over journalism (almost), and even though reporters from all over the world were converging on the capital to report on this most spectacular story—the capital of the hyperpower, drowned and smashed—most of them could only get as close as the edges of the storm, or the flood; inside that it was an ongoing state of emergency, and everyone was involved with rescues, relocations, and escapes of various kinds. The National Guard was out, all helicopters were enlisted into the effort; the video and digital imagery generated for the world to see was still incidental to other things; that in itself meant ordinary law had been suspended, and there was pressure to bring things back to all-spectacle all-the-time. Part of the National Guard found itself posted on the roads outside the region, to keep people from flooding the area as the water had. Very early on the second morning it became evident that while most areas had seen high water already, the flooding of Rock Creek had not yet crested. That night its headwaters had received the brunt of one of the hardest downpours of the storm, and the already saturated land could only shed this new rainfall into the streambed. The creek’s drop to the Tidal Basin was precipitous in some places, and for most of its length the creek ran at the bottom of a narrow gorge carved into the higher ground of Northwest District. There was nowhere to hold an excess flow. All this meant big trouble for the National Zoo, which was located on a sort of peninsula created by three turns in Rock Creek, and therefore directly overlooking the gorge. After the hard downpour in the night, the staff of the zoo congregated in the main offices to discuss the situation. They had some visiting dignitaries on hand, who had been forced to spend the previous night there; several members of the embassy of the nation of Khembalung had come to the zoo the morning before, to take part in a ceremony welcoming two Bengal tigers brought from their country to the zoo. The storm had made it impossible for them to return to Virginia, but they had seemed happy to spend the night at the zoo, concerned as they were about their tigers, and the other animals as well. Now they all watched together as one of the office’s computers showed images of Rock Creek’s gorge walls being torn away and washed downstream. Floating trees were catching in drifts against bridges over the creek, forming temporary impediments that forced water out into the flanking neighborhoods, until the bridges blew like failed dams, and powerful low walls of debris-laden water tore down the gorge harder than ever, ripping it away even more brutally. The eastern border of the zoo made it obvious how this endangered them: the light brown torrent was ripping around the park, just a few feet below the lowest levels of the zoo grounds. That plus the images on their computers made it ever more clear that the zoo was very likely to be overwhelmed, and soon. It looked like it was going to turn into something like a reversal of Noah’s flood, becoming one in which the people mostly survived, but two of every species were drowned. The Khembali legation urged the National Park staffers to evacuate the zoo as quickly as possible. The time and vehicles necessary for a proper evacuation were completely lacking, of course, as the superintendent quickly pointed out, but the Khembalis replied that by evacuation they meant opening all the cages and letting the animals escape. The zookeepers were skeptical, but the Khembalis turned out to be experts in flood response, well-acquainted with the routines required in such situations. They quickly called up photos of the zookeepers of Prague, weeping by the bodies of their drowned elephants, to show what could happen if drastic measures were not taken. They then called up the Global Disaster Information Network, which had a complete protocol for this very scenario (threatened zoos), along with real-time satellite photos and flood data. It turned out that released animals did not roam far, seldom threatened humans (who were usually locked into buildings anyway), and were easy to re-collect when the waters subsided. And the data showed Rock Creek was certain to rise further. This prediction was easy to believe, given the roaring brown water bordering most of the zoo, and almost topping the gorge. The animals certainly believed it, and were calling loudly for freedom. Elephants trumpeted, monkeys screamed, the big cats roared and growled. Every living creature, animal and human both, was terrified by this cacophony. The din was terrific, beyond anything any jungle movie had dared. Panic was in the air. Connecticut Avenue now resembled something like George Washington’s canal at Great Falls: a smooth narrow run of water, paralleling a wild torrent. All the side streets were flooded as well. Nowhere was the water very high, however—usually under a foot—and so the superintendent, looking amazed to hear himself, said “Okay let’s let them out. Cages first, then the enclosures. Work from the gate down to the lower end of the park. Come on—there’s a lot of locks to unlock.” In the dark rainy air, beside the roaring engorged creek, the staff and their visitors ventured out and began unlocking the animals. They drove them toward Connecticut when necessary, though most animals needed no urging at all, but bolted for the gates with a sure sense of the way out. Some however huddled in their enclosures or cages, and could not be coaxed out. There was no time to spare for any particular cage; if the animals refused to leave, the zookeepers moved on and hoped there would be time to return. The tapirs and deer were easy. They kept the biggest aviaries closed, feeling they would not flood to their tops. Then the zebras, and after them the cheetahs, the Australian creatures, kangaroos bounding with great splashes; the pandas trundling methodically out in a group, as if they had planned this for years. Elephants on parade; giraffes; hippos and rhinos, beavers and otters; after some consultation, and the coaxing of the biggest cats into their moving trucks, the pumas and smaller cats; then bison, wolves, camels; the seals and sea lions; bears; the gibbons all in a troop, screaming with triumph; the single black jaguar slipping dangerously into the murk; the reptiles, the Amazonian creatures already looking right at home; the prairie dog town, the drawbridge dropped to Monkey Island, causing another stampede of panicked primates; the gorillas and apes following more slowly. Now washes of brown water were spilling over the north end of the park and running swiftly down the zoo’s paths, and the lower end of the zoo was submerged by the brown flow. Very few animals continued to stay in their enclosures, and even fewer headed by mistake toward the creek; the roar was simply too frightening, the message too obvious. Every living thing’s instincts were clear on where safety lay. The water lapped higher again. It seemed to be rising in distinct surges. It had taken two full hours of frantic work to unlock all the doors, and as they were finishing, a roar louder than before overwhelmed them, and a dirty debris-filled surge poured over the whole park. Something upstream must have given way all at once. Any animals remaining in the lower section of the park would be swept away or drowned in place. Quickly the humans remaining drove the few big cats and polar bears they had herded into their trucks out the entrance and onto Connecticut Avenue. Now all Northwest was the zoo. The truck that had delivered the Swimming Tigers of Khembalung headed north on Connecticut, containing the tigers in back and the Khembali delegation piled into its cab. They drove very slowly and cautiously through the empty, dark, watery streets. The looming clouds made it look like it was already evening. The Swimming Tigers banged around in back as they drove. They sounded scared and angry, perhaps feeling that this had all happened before already. They did not seem to want to be in the back of the truck, and roared in a way that caused the humans in the cab to hunch forward unhappily. It sounded like the tigers were taking it out on each other; big bodies crashed into the walls, and the roars and growls grew angrier. The Khembali passengers advised the driver and zookeeper. They nodded and continued north on Connecticut. Any big dip would make a road impassably flooded, but Connecticut ran steadily uphill to the northwest. Then Bradley Lane allowed the driver to get most of the way west to Wisconsin. When a dip stopped him, he retreated and worked his way farther north, following streets without dips, until they made it to Wisconsin Avenue, now something like a wide smooth stream, flowing hard south, but at a depth of only six inches. They crept along against this flow until they could make an illegal left onto Woodson, and thus around the corner, into the driveway of a small house backed by a big apartment complex. In the dark air the Khembalis got out, knocked on the kitchen door. A woman appeared, and after a brief conversation, disappeared. Soon afterward, if anyone in the apartment complex had looked out of their window, they would have seen a curious sight: a group of men, some in maroon robes, others in National Park khakis, coaxing a tiger out of the back of a truck. It was wearing a collar to which three leashes were attached. When it was out the men quickly closed the truck door. The oldest man stood before the tiger, hand upraised. He took up one of the leashes, led the wet beast across the driveway to steps leading down to an open cellar door. Rain fell as the tiger stopped on the steps and looked around. The old man spoke urgently to it. From the house’s kitchen window over them, two little faces stared out round-eyed. For a moment nothing seemed to move but the rain. Then the tiger ducked in the door. Sometime during that second night the rain stopped, and though dawn of the third morning arrived sodden and gray, the clouds scattered as the day progressed, flying north at speed. By nine the sun blazed down between big puffball clouds onto the flooded city. The air was breezy and unsettled. Charlie had again spent this second night in the office, and when he woke he looked out the window hoping that conditions would have eased enough for him to be able to attempt getting home. The phones were still down, although e-mails from Anna had kept him informed and reassured—at least until the previous evening’s news about the arrival of the Khembalis, which had caused him some alarm, not just because of the tiger in the basement, but because of their interest in Joe. He had not expressed any of this in his e-mail replies, of course. But he most definitely wanted to get home. Helicopters and blimps had already taken to the air in great numbers. Now all the TV channels in the world could reveal the extent of the flood from on high. Much of downtown Washington, D.C., remained awash. A giant shallow lake occupied precisely the most famous and public parts of the city; it looked like someone had decided to expand the Mall’s reflecting pool beyond all reason. The rivers and streams that converged on this larger tidal basin were still in spate, which kept the new lake topped up. In the washed sunlight the flat expanse of water was the color of caffe latte, with foam. Standing in the lake, of course, were hundreds of buildings-become-islands, and a few real islands, and even some freeway viaducts, now acting as bridges over the Anacostia Valley. The Potomac continued to pour through the west edge of the lake, overspilling its banks both upstream and down, whenever lowlands flanked it. Its surface was studded with floating junk which moved slower the farther downstream it got. Apparently the ebb tides had only begun to draw this vast bolus of water out to sea. As the morning wore on, more and more boats appeared. The TV shots from the air made it look like some kind of regatta—the Mall as water festival, like something out of Ming China. Many people were out on makeshift craft that did not look at all seaworthy. Police boats on patrol were even beginning to ask people who were not doing rescue work to leave, one report said, though clearly they were not having much of an impact. The situation was still so new that the law had not yet fully asserted itself. Motorboats zipped about, leaving beige wakes behind. Rowers rowed, paddlers paddled, kayakers kayaked, swimmers swam; some people were even out in the blue foot-pedaled boats that had once been confined to the Tidal Basin, pedaling around the Mall in majestic ministeamboat style. Although these images from the Mall dominated the media, some channels carried other news from around the region. Hospitals were filled. The two days of the storm had killed many people, no one knew how many; and there had been many rescues as well. In the first part of the third morning, the TV helicopters often interrupted their overviews to pluck people from rooftops. Rescues by boat were occurring all through Southwest district and up the Anacostia Basin. Reagan Airport remained drowned, and there was no passable bridge over the Potomac all the way upstream to Harpers Ferry. The Great Falls of the Potomac were no more than a huge turbulence in a nearly unbroken, gorge-topping flow. The President had evacuated to Camp David, and now he declared all of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware a federal disaster area; the District of Columbia, in his words, “worse than that.” Charlie’s phone chirped and he snatched it to him. “Anna?” “Charlie! Where are you!” “I’m still at the office! Are you home?” “Oh good yes! I’m here with the boys, we never left. We’ve got the Khembalis here with us too, you got my e-mails?” “Yes, I wrote back.” “Oh that’s right. They got caught at the zoo. I’ve been trying to get you on the phone this whole time!” “Me you too, except when I fell asleep. I was so glad to get your e-mails.” “Yeah that was good. I’m so glad you’re okay. This is crazy! Is your building completely flooded?” “No no, not at all. So how are the boys?” “Oh they’re fine. They’re loving it. It’s all I can do to keep them inside.” “Keep them inside.” “Yes yes. So your building isn’t flooded? Isn’t the Mall flooded?” “Yes it is, no doubt about that, but not the building here, not too badly anyway. They’re keeping the doors shut, and trying to seal them at the bottoms. It’s not working great, but it isn’t dangerous. It’s just a matter of staying upstairs.” “Your generators are working?” “Yes.” “I hear a lot of them are flooded.” “Yeah I can see how that would happen. No one was expecting this.” “No. Generators in basements, it’s stupid I suppose.” “That’s where ours is.” “I know. But it’s on that table, and it’s working.” “What about food, how are we set there?” Charlie tried to imagine their cupboards. “Well, we’ve got a bit. You know. It’s not great. It will get to be a problem soon if we can’t get more. I figure we might have a few weeks’ worth in a pinch.” “Well, that should be fine. I mean, they’ll “I suppose. We need water service too.” “Will the floodwaters drain away very fast?” “I don’t know, how should I know?” “Well, I don’t know—you’re a scientist.” “Please.” They listened to each other breathe. “I sure am glad to be talking to you,” Charlie said. “I hated being out of touch like that.” “Me too.” “There are boats all around us now,” Charlie said. “I’ll try to get a ride home as soon as I can. Once I get ferried to land, I can walk home.” “Not necessarily. The Taft Bridge over Rock Creek is gone. You’d only be able to cross on the Mass. Ave. bridge, from what I can see on the news.” “Yeah, I saw Rock Creek flooding, that was amazing.” “I know. The zoo and everything. Drepung says most of the animals will be recovered, but I wonder about that.” Anna would be nearly as upset by the deaths of the zoo’s animals as she would be by people. She made little distinction. Charlie said, “I’ll take Mass. Ave. then.” “Or maybe you can get them to drop you off west of Rock Creek, in Georgetown. Anyway, be careful. Don’t do anything rash just to get here quick.” “I won’t. I’ll make sure to stay safe, and I’ll call you regularly, at least I hope. That was awful being cut off.” “I know.” “Okay, well…I don’t really want to hang up, but I guess I should. Let me talk to the boys first.” “Yeah good. Here talk to Joe, he’s been pretty upset that you’re not here, he keeps asking for you. Demanding you, actually—here,” and then suddenly in his ear: “Dadda?” “Joe!” “Da! Da!” “Yeah Joe, it’s Dad! Good to hear you, boy! I’m down at work, I’ll be home soon buddy.” “Da! Da!” Then, in a kind of moan: “Wan Daaaaaaaaaa.” “It’s okay Joe,” Charlie said, throat clenching. “I’ll be home real soon. Don’t you worry.” Anna got back on. “Sorry, he’s throwing a fit. Here, Nick wants to talk too.” “Hey, Nick! Are you taking care of Mom and Joe?” “Yeah, I was, but Joe is kind of upset right now.” “He’ll get over it. So what’s it been like up there?” “Well you see, we got to burn those big candles? And I made a big tower out of the melted wax, it’s really cool. And then Drepung and Rudra came and brought their tigers, they’ve got one in their truck and one in our basement!” “That’s nice, that’s very cool. Be sure to keep the door to the basement closed by the way.” Nick laughed. “It’s locked Dad. Mom has the key.” “Good. Did you get a lot of rain?” “I think so. We can see that Wisconsin is kind of flooded, but there are still some cars going in it. Most of the big stuff we’ve only seen on the TV. Mom was really worried about you. When are you going to get home?” “Soon as I can.” “Good.” “Yeah. Well, I guess you get a few days off school out of all this. Okay, give me your mom back. Hi babe.” “Listen, you stay put until some really safe way to get home comes.” “I will.” “We love you.” “I love you too. I’ll be home soon as I can.” Then Joe began to wail again, and they hung up. Charlie rejoined the others and told them his news. Others were getting through on their cell phones as well. Everyone was talking. Then there came yells from down the hall. A police motor launch was at the second-floor windows, facing Constitution, ready to ferry people to dry ground. This one was going west, and yes, would eventually dock in Georgetown, if people wanted off there. It was perfect for Charlie’s hope to get west of Rock Creek and then walk home. And so, when his turn came, he climbed out the window and down into the big boat. A stanza from a Robert Frost poem he had memorized in high school came back to him suddenly: He laughed as he moved forward in the boat to make room for other refugees. Strange what came back to the mind. How had that poem continued? Something something; he couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. The relevant part had come to him, after waiting all these years. And now he was out the window and on his way. The launch rumbled, glided away from the building, turned in a broad curve west down Constitution Avenue. Then left, out onto the broad expanse of the Mall. They were boating on the Mall. The National Gallery reminded him of the Taj Mahal; same water reflection, same gorgeous white stone. All the Smithsonian buildings looked amazing. No doubt they had been working inside them all night to get things above flood level. What a mess it was going to be. Charlie steadied himself against the gunwale, feeling so stunned that it seemed he might lose his balance and fall. That was probably the boat’s doing, but he was, in all truth, reeling. The TV images had been one thing, the actual reality another; he could scarcely believe his eyes. White clouds danced overhead in the blue sky, and the flat brown lake was gleaming in the sunlight, reflecting a blue glitter of sky, everything all glossy and compact—real as real, or even more so. None of his visions had ever been as remotely real as this lake was now. Their pilot maneuvered them farther south. They were going to pass the Washington Monument on its south side. They puttered slowly past it. It towered over them like an obelisk in the Nile’s flood, making all the watercraft look correspondingly tiny. The Smithsonian buildings appeared to be drowned to about ten feet. Upper halves of their big public doors emerged from the water like low boathouse doors. For some of the buildings that would be a catastrophe. Others had steps, or stood higher on their foundations. A mess any way you looked at it. Their launch growled west at a walking pace. Trees flanking the western half of the Mall looked like water shrubs in the distance. The Vietnam Memorial would of course be submerged. The Lincoln Memorial stood on its own pedestal hill, but it was right on the Potomac, and might be submerged to the height of all its steps; the statue of Lincoln might even be getting his feet wet. Charlie found it hard to tell, through the strangely shortened trees, just how high the water was down there. Boats of all kinds dotted the long brown lake, headed this way and that. The little blue pedal boats from the Tidal Basin were particularly festive, but all the kayaks and rowboats and inflatables added their dots of neon color, and the little sailboats tacking back and forth flashed their triangular sails. The brilliant sunlight filled the clouds and the blue sky. The festival mood was expressed even by what people wore—Charlie saw Hawaiian shirts, bathing suits, even Carnival masks. There were many more black faces than Charlie was used to seeing on the Mall. It looked as if something like Trinidad’s Mardi Gras parade had been disrupted by a night of storms, but was reemerging triumphant in the new day. People were waving to one another, shouting things (the helicopters overhead were loud); standing in boats in unsafe postures, turning in precarious circles to shoot three-sixties with cameras. It would only take a water skier to complete the scene. Charlie moved to the bow of the launch, and stood there soaking it all in. His mouth hung open like a dog’s. The effort of getting out the window had reinflamed his chest and arms; now he stood there on fire, torching in the wind, drinking in the maritime vision. Their boat chugged west like a vaporetto on Venice’s broad lagoon. He could not help but laugh. “Maybe they should keep it this way,” someone said. A Navy river cruiser came growling over the Potomac toward them, throwing up a white bow wave on its upstream side. When it reached the Mall it slipped through a gap in the cherry trees, cut back on its engines, settled down in the water, continued east at a more sedate pace. It was going to pass pretty close by them, and Charlie felt their own launch slow down as well. Then he spotted a familiar face among the people standing in the bow of the patrol boat. It was Phil Chase, waving to the boats he passed like the grand marshal of a parade, leaning over the front rail to shout greetings. Like a lot of other people on the water that morning, he had the happy look of someone who had already lit out for the territory. Charlie waved with both arms, leaning over the side of the launch. They were closing on each other. Charlie cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted as loud as he could. “HEY PHIL! Phil Chase!” Phil heard him, looked over, saw him. “Hey Charlie!” He waved cheerily, then cupped his hands around his mouth too. “Good to see you! Is everyone at the office okay?” “Yes!” “Good! That’s good!” Phil straightened up, gestured broadly at the flood. “Isn’t this amazing?” “Yes! It sure is!” Then the words burst out of Charlie: “So Phil grinned his beautiful grin. “I’ll see what I can do!” |
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