"Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

VII Tit for Tat

The Earth’s atmosphere now contains a percentage of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that is higher than it has been since the end of the Cretaceous. This means more heat from the sun is being trapped in our air, and the high-pressure cells we saw this year are bigger, warmer, and loft higher in the tropical atmosphere. Many common jet-stream patterns have been disrupted, and the storms spiraling out of the Tropics have gained in both frequency and intensity. The hurricane season in the Atlantic ran from April to November, and there were eight hurricanes and six tropical storms. Typhoons in the East Pacific happened all year, twenty-two all told. Mass flooding resulted, but it should be noted that in other regions droughts have been breaking records.

So the effects have been various, but the changes are general and pervasive, and the damage for the year was recently estimated at six hundred billion dollars, with deaths in the thousands. So far the United States has escaped major catastrophe, and attention to the problem has not been one of the administration’s central concerns. “In a healthy economy the weather isn’t important,” the President remarked. But the possibility is there that the added energy in the atmosphere could trigger what climatologists call abrupt climate change. How that might begin, no one can be sure.

Anna flew through the blur of a midweek day. Up and off, Metro to the office; pound the keys, wrestling with some faulty data from an NSF educational outreach program, the spreadsheet work eating up hours like minutes. Stop to pump, then to eat at her desk (it felt a little too weird to eat and pump at the same time), all the while data wrangling. Then a look at an e-mail from Drepung and Sucandra about their grant proposals.

Anna had helped them to write a small raft of proposals, and it had indeed been a pleasure, as they did all the real work—and very well too—while she just added her expertise in grant writing, honed through some tens of thousands of grant evaluations. She definitely knew that world, how to sequence the information, what to emphasize, what language to use, what supporting documents, what arguments—all of it. Every word and punctuation mark of a grant proposal she had a feel for, one way or the other. It had been a pleasure to apply that expertise to the Khembalis’ attempts.

Now she was pleased again to find that they had heard back from three of them, two positively. NSF had awarded them a quick temporary starter grant in the “Tropical Oceans, Global Atmosphere” effort; and the INDOEX countries had agreed informally to expand their Project Asian Brown Cloud (ABC) to include a big new monitoring facility on Khembalung, including researchers. This would cement a partnership with the START units already scattered all over South Asia. Altogether it meant funding streams for several years to come—tens of millions of dollars all told, with infrastructure built, and relationships with neighboring countries established. Allies in the struggle.

“Oh that’s very nice,” Anna said, and hit the PRINT button. She cc’d the news to Charlie, sent congratulations to Drepung, and then got back to work on the spreadsheet.

After a while she remembered about the printouts, and went around the corner to the Department of Unfortunate Statistics to get the hard copies.

She found Frank inside, shaking his head over the latest.

“Have you seen this one?” he said, gesturing with his nose at a taped-up printout of yet another spreadsheet.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s the latest Gini figures, do you know those?”

“No?”

“They’re a measurement of income distribution in a population, so an index of the gap between rich and poor. Most industrialized democracies rate at between 2.5 and 3.5, that’s where we were in the 1950’s, see, but our numbers started to shoot up in the 1980’s, and now we’re worse than the worst third world countries. 4.0 or greater is considered to be very inequitable, and we’re at 5.2 and rising.”

Anna looked briefly at the graph, interested in the statistical method. A Lorenz curve, plotting the distance away from perfect equality’s straight line tilted at forty-five degrees.

“Interesting…So this is for annual incomes?”

“That’s right.”

“So if it were for capital holdings—”

“It would be worse, I should think. Sure.” Frank shook his head, disgusted. He had come back from San Diego in a permanently foul mood. No doubt anxious to finish and go home.

“Well,” Anna said, looking at her printout, “maybe the Khembalis aren’t so bad off after all.”

“How’s that?”

Anna showed him the pages. “They’ve gotten a couple grants. It’ll make them some good contacts.”

“Very nice, did you do this?” Frank took the pages.

“I just pointed them at things. They’re turning out to be good at following through. And I helped Drepung rewrite the grant proposals. You know how it is, after doing this job for a few years you do know how to write a grant proposal.”

“No lie. Nice job.” He handed the pages back to her. “Good to see someone doing something.”

Anna returned to her desk, glancing after him. He was definitely edgy these days. He had always been that way, of course, ever since the day he arrived. Dissatisfied, cynical, sharp-tongued; it was hard not to contrast him to the Khembalis. Here he was, about to go home to one of the best departments in one of the best universities in one of the nicest cities in the world’s richest country, and he was unhappy. Meanwhile the Khembalis were essentially multigenerational exiles, occupying a tidal sandbar in near poverty, and they were happy.

Or at least cheerful. She did not mean to downplay their situation, but these days she never saw that unhappy look that had so struck her the first time she had seen Drepung. No, they were cheerful, which was different than happy; a policy perhaps, rather than a feeling. But that only made it more admirable.

Well, everyone was different. She got back to the tedious grind of changing data. Then Drepung called, and they shared the pleasure of the good news about the grant proposals. They discussed the details, and then Drepung said, “We have you to thank for this, Anna. So thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but it wasn’t really me, it’s the Foundation and all the other organizations.”

“But you are the one who piloted us through the maze. We owe you big time.”

Anna laughed despite herself.

“What?”

“Nothing, it’s just that you sound like Charlie. You sound like you’ve been watching sports on TV.”

“I do like watching basketball, I must admit.”

“That’s fine. Just don’t start listening to that rap music okay? I don’t think I could handle that.”

“I won’t. You know me, I like Bollywood. Anyway, you must let us thank you somehow for this. We will have you to dinner.”

“That would be nice.”

“And maybe you can join us at the zoo when our tigers arrive. Recently a pair of Bengal tigers were rescued off Khembalung after a flood. The papers in India call them the Swimming Tigers, and they are coming for a stay at the National Zoo here. We will have a small ceremony when they arrive.”

“That would be great. The boys would love that. And also—” An idea had occurred to her.

“Yes?”

“Maybe you could come upstairs and visit us here, and give one of our lunchtime lectures. That would be a great way to return a favor. We could learn more about your situation, and, you know, your approach to science, or to life, or whatever. Something like that. Do you think Rudra would be interested?”

“I’m sure he would. It would be a great opportunity.”

“Well not exactly, it’s just a lunchtime series of talks that Aleesha runs, but I do think it would be interesting. We could use some of your attitude here, I think, and you could talk about these programs too, if you wanted.”

“I’ll talk to the rimpoche about it.”

“Okay good. I’ll put Aleesha in touch.”

After that Anna worked on the stats again, until she saw the time and realized it was her day to visit Nick’s class and help them with math hour. “Ah shit.” Throw together a bag of work stuff, shut down, heft the shoulder bag of chilled milk bottles, and off she went. Down into the Metro, working as she sat, then standing on the crowded Red Line, Shady Grove train; out and up and into a taxi, of all things, to get to Nick’s school on time.

She arrived just a little late, dumped her stuff, and settled down to work with the kids. Nick was in third grade now, but had been put in an advanced math group. In general the class did things in math that Anna found surprising for their age. She liked working with them; there were twenty-eight kids in the class, and Mrs. Wilkins, their teacher, was grateful for the help.

Anna wandered from group to group, helping with multipart problems that involved multiplication, division, and rounding off. When she came to Nick’s group she sat down on one of the tiny chairs next to him, and they elbowed each other playfully for room at the round low table. He loved it when she came to his class, which she had tried to do on a semiregular basis every year since he had started school.

“All right Nick quit that, show the gang here how you’re going to solve this problem.”

“Okay.” He furrowed his brow in a way she recognized inside the muscles of her own forehead. “Thirty-nine divided by two, that’s…nineteen and a half…round that up to twenty—”

“No, don’t round off in the middle of the process.”

“Mom, come on.”

“Hey, you shouldn’t.”

“Mom, you’re quibbling again!” Nick exclaimed.

The group cackled at this old joke.

“It’s not quibbling,” Anna insisted. “It’s a very important distinction.”

“What, the difference between nineteen and a half and twenty?”

“Yes,” over their squeals of laughter, “because you should never round off in the middle of an operation, because then the things you do later will exaggerate the inaccuracy! It’s an important principle!”

“Mrs. Quibler is a quibbler, Mrs. Quibler is a quibbler!”

Anna gave in and gave them The Eye, a squinting, one-eyed glare that she had worked up long ago when playing Lady Bracknell in high school. It never failed to crack them up. She growled, “That’s Quibler with one b,” melting them with laughter, as always, until Mrs. Wilkins came over to join the party and quiet it down.

After school Anna and Nick walked home together. It took about half an hour, and was one of the treasured rituals of their week—the only time they got to spend together just the two of them. Past the big public pool where they would go swimming in the summers, past the grocery store, then down their quiet street. It was hot, of course, but bearable in the shade. They talked about whatever came into their heads.

Then they entered the coolness of their house, and returned to the wilder world of Joe and Charlie. Charlie was bellowing as he cooked in the kitchen, an off-key, wordless aria. Joe was killing dinosaurs in the living room. As they entered he froze, considering how he was going to signify his displeasure at Anna’s treasonous absence for the day. When younger this had been a genuine emotion, and sometimes when he saw her come in the door he had simply burst into tears. Now it was calculated, and she was immune.

He smacked himself in the forehead with a compsognathus, then collapsed to the rug face first.

“Oh come on,” Anna said. “Give me a break Joe.” She started to unbutton her blouse. “You better be nice if you want to nurse.”

Joe popped right up and ran over to give her a hug.

“Right,” Anna said. “Blackmail will get you everywhere. Hi hon!” she yelled in at Charlie.

“Hi babe.” Charlie came out to give her a kiss. For a second all her boys hung on her. Then Joe was latched on, and Charlie and Nick went into the kitchen. From there Charlie shouted out from time to time, but Anna couldn’t yell back without making Joe mad enough to bite her, so she waited until he was done and then walked around the corner into the kitchen.

“How was your day?” Charlie said.

“I fixed a data error all day long.”

“That’s good dear.”

She gave him a look. “I swore I wasn’t going to do it,” she said darkly, “but I just couldn’t bring myself to ignore it.”

“No, I’m sure you couldn’t.”

He kept a straight face, but she punched him on the arm anyway. “Smartass. Is there any beer in the fridge?”

“I think so.”

She hunted for one. “There was some good news that came in, did you see that? I forwarded it. The Khembalis got a couple of grants.”

“Really! That is good news.” He was sniffing at a yellow curry bubbling in the frying pan.

“Something new?”

“Yeah, I’m trying something out of the paper.”

“You’re being careful?”

He grinned. “Yeah, no blackened redfish.”

“Blackened redfish?” Nick repeated, alarmed.

“Don’t worry, even I wouldn’t try it on you.”

“He wouldn’t want you to catch fire.”

“Hey, it was in the recipe. It was right out of the recipe!”

“So? A tablespoon each of black pepper, white pepper, cayenne and chili powder?”

“How was I supposed to know?”

“What do you mean, you use pepper. You should have known what a tablespoon of pepper would taste like, and that was the least hot of them.”

“I guess I didn’t know it would all stick to the fish.”

Nick was looking appalled. “I wouldn’t eat that.”

“You aren’t kidding.” Anna laughed. “One touch with your tongue and you would spontaneously combust.”

“It was in a cookbook.”

“Even going in the kitchen the next day was enough to burn your eyes out.”

Charlie was giggling at his folly, holding the stirring spoon down to Nick to gross him out, although now he had a very light touch with the spices. The curry would be fine. Anna left him to it and went out to play with Joe.

She sat down on the couch, relaxed. Joe began to pummel her knees with blocks, babbling energetically. At the same time Nick was telling her something about something. She had to interrupt him, almost, to tell him about the coming of the Swimming Tigers. He nodded and took off again with his account. She heaved a great sigh of relief, took a sip of the beer. Another day flown past like a dream.

Another heat wave struck, the worst so far. People had thought it was hot before, but now it was July, and one day the temperature in the metropolitan area climbed to 105 degrees, with the humidity over ninety percent. The combination had all the Indians in town waxing nostalgic about Uttar Pradesh just before the monsoon broke, “Oh very much yes, just like this in Delhi, actually it would be a blessing if it were to be like this in Delhi, it would be a great improvement over what they have now, third year of drought you see, they are needing the monsoon to be coming very badly.”

The morning Post included an article informing Charlie that a chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf had broken off, a chunk more than half the size of France. The news was buried in the last pages of the international section. So many pieces of Antarctica had fallen off that it wasn’t big news anymore.

It wasn’t big news, but it was a big iceberg. Researchers joked about moving onto it and declaring it a new nation. It contained more fresh water than all the Great Lakes combined. It had come off near a Roosevelt Island, a low black rock that had been buried under the ice and known only to radar probes, and so was exposed to the air for the first time in either two or fifteen million years, depending on which research team you believed. Although it might not be exposed for long; pouring down toward it, researchers said, was the rapid ice of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, unimpeded now that the Ross Shelf in that region had embarked, and therefore moving faster than ever.

This accelerated flow of ice toward the sea had big ramifications. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet was much bigger than the Ross Ice Shelf, and had been resting on ground that was below sea level but that held the ice much higher than it would have been if it had been floating freely in the ocean. So when it broke up and sailed away, it would displace more ocean water than it had before.

Charlie read on, feeling somewhat amazed that he was learning this in the back pages of the Post. How fast could this happen? The researchers didn’t appear to know. As the sheet broke away, they said, seawater was lifting the edges of the ice still resting on the bottom, deeper and deeper at every tide, tugging with every current, and thus beginning to tear the sheet apart in big vertical cracks, and launch it out to sea.

Charlie checked this on the web, and watched one trio of researchers explain on camera that it could become an accelerating process, their words likewise accelerating a bit, as if to illustrate how it would go. Modeling inconclusive because the sea bottom under the grounded ice irregular, they said, with active volcanoes under it, so who knew? But it very well might happen fast.

Charlie heard in their voices the kind of repressed delirium of scientific excitement that he had heard once or twice when listening to Anna talk about some extraordinary thing in statistics that he had not even been able to understand. This, however, he understood. They were saying that the possibility was very real that the whole mass of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would break apart and float away, each giant piece of it then sinking more deeply into the water, thus displacing more water than it had when grounded in place—so much more that sea level worldwide could rise by an eventual total of about seven meters. “This could happen fast,” one glaciologist emphasized, “and I’m not talking geology fast here, I’m talking tide fast. A matter of several years in some simulations.” The hard thing to pinpoint was whether it would start to accelerate or not. It depended on variables programmed into the models—on they went, the usual kind of scientist talk.

And yet the Post had it at the back of the international section! People were talking about it the same way they did any other disaster. There did not seem to be any way to register a distinction in response between one coming catastrophe and another. They were all bad. If it happened it happened. That seemed to be the way people were processing it. Of course the Khembalis would have to be extremely concerned. The whole League of Drowning Nations, for that matter. Meaning everyone. Charlie had done enough research on the tidal power stuff, and other coastal issues, to give him a sharpened sense that this was serious, and perhaps the tipping point into something worse. All of a sudden it coalesced into a clear vision standing before him, and what he saw frightened him. Twenty percent of humanity lived on the coast. He felt like he had one time driving in winter when he had taken a turn too fast and hit an icy patch he hadn’t seen, and the car had detached and he found himself flying forward, free of friction or even gravity, as if sideslipping in reality itself.

But it was time to go downtown. He was going to take Joe with him to the office. He pulled himself together, got out the stroller so they would spare each other their body heat. Life had to go on; what else could he do?

Out they ventured into the steambath of the capital. It really didn’t feel that much different than the ordinary summer day. As if the sensation of heat hit an upper limit where it just blurred out. Joe was seatbelted into his stroller like a NASCAR driver, so that he would not launch himself out at inopportune moments. Naturally he did not like this and he objected to the stroller because of it, but Charlie had decorated its front bar as an airplane cockpit dashboard, which placated Joe enough that he did not persist in his howls or attempts to escape. “Resistance is futile!”

They took the elevators in the Metro stations and came up on the Mall, to stroll over to Phil’s office in the old carpenters’ union. A bad idea, as crossing the Mall was like being blanched in boiling air. Charlie, as always, experienced the climate deviation with a kind of grim “I Told You So” satisfaction. But once again he resolved to quit eating boiled lobsters. It would be a bad way to go.

At Phil’s they rolled around the rooms trying to find the best spots in the falls of chilled air pouring from the air-conditioning vents. Everyone was doing this, drifting around like a science museum exercise investigating the Coriolis force.

Charlie parked Joe out with Evelyn, who loved him, and went to work on Phil’s revisions to the climate bill. It certainly seemed like a good time to introduce it. More money for CO₂ remediation, new fuel efficiency standards and the money to get Detroit through the transition to hydrogen, new fuels and power sources, carbon capture methods, carbon sink identification and formation, hydrocarbon-to-carbohydrate-to-hydrogen conversion funds and exchange credit programs, deep geothermal, tide power, wave power, money for basic research in climatology, money for the Extreme Global Research in Emergency Salvation Strategies project (EGRESS), money for the Global Disaster Information Network (GDIN)—and so on and so forth. It was a grab bag of programs, many designed to look like pork to help the bill get the votes, but Charlie had done his best to give the whole thing organization, and a kind of coherent shape, as a narrative of the near future.

There were many in Phil’s office who thought it was a mistake to try to pass an omnibus or comprehensive bill like this, rather than get the programs funded one by one, or in smaller related groupings. But the comprehensive had been Phil’s chosen strategy, and Charlie felt that at this late point it was better to stick to that plan. He added language to make the revisions Phil wanted, pushing the envelope in each case, as it seemed now, if ever, was the time to strike.

Joe was beginning to get rowdy with Evelyn, he could hear the unmistakable sound of dinosaurs hitting walls. All this language would get chopped up anyway; still, all the more reason to get it precise and smooth, armored against attack, low-keyed and unobjectionable, invisibly effective. Bill language as low-post moves to the basket, subtle, quick, unstoppable.

He rushed to a finish and took the revised bill in to Phil, with Joe leading the way in his stroller. They found the senator sitting with his back directly against an air-conditioning duct.

“Jeez Phil, don’t you get too cold sitting there?”

“The trick is to set up before you’re all sweaty, and then you don’t get the evaporative cooling. And I keep my head above it,” banging the wall with the back of his noggin, “so I don’t catch as many a-c colds. I learned that a long time ago, when I was stationed on Okinawa.”

He glanced over Charlie’s new revision, and they argued over some of the changes. At one point Phil looked at him: “Something bugging you today?” He glanced over at Joe. “Joe here seems to be grooving. The President’s favorite toddler.”

“It’s not Joe that’s getting to me, it’s you. You and the rest of the Senate. This is it, Phil—the current situation requires a response that is more than business as usual. And that’s worrying me, because you guys are only geared to do business as usual.”

“Well…” Phil smiled. “We call that democracy, youth. It’s a blessing when you think of it. Some give and take, and then some agreement on how to proceed. How can we do without that? There’s a certain accountability to it. So if you have a better way of doing it you tell me. But please, meanwhile, no more ‘If I Were King’ fantasies. There’s no king and it’s up to us. So help me get this final draft as tight as we can.”

“Okay.”

They worked together with the speed and efficiency of old teammates. Sometimes collaboration could be a pleasure, sometimes it really was a matter of only having to do half of it, and the two halves adding up to more than their parts.

Then Joe got restive, and nothing would keep him in his stroller but a quick departure and a tour of the street scene. “I’ll finish,” Phil said.

So, back out into the stupendous heat. Charlie was knocked out by it faster than Joe. The world melted around them. Charlie gumbied along, leaning on the stroller for support. Down an elevator into the Metro. Air-conditioning again, thank God. Crash into pink seat cushions. As they rode north, slumped and rocking slightly with their train, Charlie drowsily entertained Joe with some of the toys in the stroller, picking them up and fingering them one by one. “See, this turtle is NIH. Your Frankenstein monster is the FDA, look how poorly he’s put together. This little mole, that’s Mom’s NSF. These two guys, they’re like the guy on the Monopoly game, they must be the two parts of Congress, yeah, very Tammany Hall. Where the hell did you get those. Your Iron Giant is of course the Pentagon, and this yellow bulldozer is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The magnifying glass is the GAO, and this, what is it, like Barbie? That must be the OMB, those bimbos, or maybe this Pinocchio here. And your cowboy on a horse is the President of course, he’s your friend, he’s your friend, he’s your friend.”

They were both falling asleep. Joe batted the toy figures into a pile.

“Careful Joe. Ooh, there’s your tiger. That’s the press corps, that’s a circus tiger, see its collar? Nobody’s scared of it. Although sometimes it does get to eat somebody.”

In the days that followed, Phil took the climate bill back to the Foreign Relations Committee, and the process of marking it up began in earnest. “To mark up” was a very inadequate verb to express the process: “carving,” “rendering,” “hacking,” “hatcheting,” “stomping,” any of these would have been more accurate, Charlie thought as he tracked the gradual deconstruction of the language of the bill, the result turned slowly into a kind of sausage of thought.

The bill lost parts as they duked it out. Winston fought every phrase of it, and he had to be given some things or nothing would proceed. No precisely spelled-out fuel efficiencies, no acknowledgment of any measurements like the ecological footprint. Phil gave on these because Winston was promising that he would get the House to agree to this version in conference, and the White House would back him too. And so entire methodologies of analysis were being declared off-limits, something that would drive Anna crazy. Another example of science and capital clashing, Charlie thought. Science was like Beeker from the Muppets, haplessly struggling with the round top-hatted guy from the Monopoly game. Right now Beeker was getting his butt kicked.

Two mornings later Charlie learned about it in the Post (and how irritating was that?):

“Say what!” Charlie cried. He hadn’t even heard of the possibility of such a maneuver.

He read paragraphs per eye-twitch while he got on the phone and told it to call Roy:

“Ah shit. Shit. God damn it!”

“Charlie, that must be you.”

“ Roy what is this shit, when did this happen?”

“Last night. Didn’t you hear?”

“No I didn’t! How could Phil do this!”

“We counted votes, and the biggie wasn’t going to get out of committee. And if it did, the House wasn’t going to go for it. Winston couldn’t deliver, or wouldn’t. So Phil decided to support Ellington on Ellington’s alternative-fuels bill, and he made sure they put more of Ellington’s stuff in the first several shorter bills.”

“And Ellington agreed to vote for it on that basis.”

“That’s right.”

“So Phil traded horses.”

“The comprehensive was going to lose.”

“You don’t know that for sure! They had Speck with them and so they could have carried it on party lines! Who cares what kind of fuel we’re burning if the world has melted! This was important, Roy!”

“It wasn’t going to win,” Roy said, enunciating each word. “We counted the votes and it lost by one. After that we went for what we could. You know Phil. He likes to get things done.”

“As long as they’re easy.”

“You’re still pissed off about this. You should go talk to Phil yourself, maybe it will impact what he does next time. I’ve got to get to a meeting uptown.”

“Okay maybe I’ll do that.”

And as it was another morning of Joe and Dad on the town, he was free to do so. He sat on the Metro, absorbing Joe’s punches and thinking things over, and when he got the stroller out of the elevator on the third floor of the office he drove it straight for Phil, who today was sitting on a desk in the outer conference room, holding court as blithe and bald-faced as a monkey.

Charlie aimed the wadded Post like a stick at Phil, who saw him and winced theatrically. “Okay!” he said, palm held out to stop the assault. “Okay kick my ass! Kick my ass right here! But I’ll tell you right now that they made me do it.”

He was turning it into another office debate, so Charlie went for it full bore. “What do you mean they made you do it? You caved, Phil. You gave away the store!”

Phil shook his head vehemently. “I got more than I gave. They’re going to have to reduce carbon emissions anyway, we were never going to get much more from them on that—”

“What do you mean!” Charlie shouted.

Andrea and some of the others came out of their rooms, and even Evelyn looked in, though mostly to say hi to Joe. It was a regular schtick: Charlie hammering Phil for his compromises, Phil admitting to all and baiting Charlie to ever greater outrage. Charlie, recognizing this, was still determined to make his point, even if it meant he had to play his usual part. Even if he didn’t convince Phil himself, if Phil’s group here would bear down on him a little harder…

Charlie whacked Phil with the Post. “If you would have stuck to your guns we could have sequestered billions of tons of carbon. The whole world’s with us on this!”

Phil made a face. “I would have stuck to my guns, Charlie, but then the rest of our wonderful party would have shot me in the foot with those guns. The House wasn’t there either. This way we got what was possible. We got it out of committee, damn it, and that’s not peanuts. We got out with the full roadless forest requirement and the Arctic refuge and the offshore drilling ban, all of those, and the President has promised to sign them already.”

“They were always gonna give you those! You would have had to have died not to get those. Meanwhile you gave up on the really crucial stuff! They played you like a fish.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Did not.”

“Did too!”

Yes, this was the level of debate in the offices of one of the greatest senators in the land. It always came down to that between them.

But this time Charlie wasn’t enjoying it like he usually did. “What didn’t you give up,” he said bitterly.

“Just the forests streams and oil of North America!”

Their little audience laughed. It was still a debating society to them. Phil licked his finger and chalked one up, then smiled at Charlie, a shot of the pure Chase grin, fetching and mischievous.

Charlie was unassuaged. “You’d better fund a bunch of submarines to enjoy all those things.”

That too got a laugh. And Phil chalked one up for Charlie, still smiling.

Charlie pushed Joe’s stroller out of the building, cursing bitterly. Joe heard his tone of voice and absorbed himself in the passing scene and his dinosaurs. Charlie pushed him along, sweating, feeling more and more discouraged. He knew he was taking it too seriously, he knew that Phil’s house style was to treat it as a game, to keep taking shots and not worry too much. But still, given the situation, he couldn’t help it. He felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach.

This didn’t happen very often. He usually managed to find some way to compensate in his mind for the various reversals of any political day. Bright side, silver lining, eventual revenge, whatever. Some fantasy in which it all came right. So when discouragement did hit him, it struck home with unaccustomed force. It became a global thing for which he had no defense; he couldn’t see the forest for the trees, he couldn’t see the good in anything. The black clouds had black linings. All bad! Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad.

He pushed into a Metro elevator, descended with Joe into the depths. They got on a car, came to the Bethesda stop. Charlie zombied them out. Bad, bad, bad. Sartrean nausea, induced by a sudden glimpse of reality; horrible that it should be so. That the true nature of reality should be so awful. The blanched air in the elevator was unbreathable. Gravity was too heavy.

Out of the elevator, onto Wisconsin. Bethesda was too dismal. A spew of office and apartment blocks, obviously organized (if that was the word) for the convenience of the cars roaring by. A ridiculous, inhuman autopia. It might as well have been Orange County.

He dragged down the sidewalk home. Walked in the front door. The screen door slapped behind him with its characteristic whack.

From the kitchen: “Hi hon!”

“Hi Dad!”

It was Anna and Nick’s day to come home together after school.

“Momma Momma Momma!”

“Hi Joe!”

Refuge. “Hi guys,” Charlie said. “We need a rowboat. We’ll keep it in the garage.”

“Cool!”

Anna heard his tone of voice and came out of the kitchen with a whisk in hand, gave him a hug and a peck on the cheek.

“Hmm,” he said, a kind of purr.

“What’s wrong babe.”

“Oh, everything.”

“Poor hon.”

He began to feel better. He released Joe from the stroller and they followed Anna into the kitchen. As Anna picked up Joe and held him on her hip while she continued to cook, Charlie began to shape the story of the day in his mind, to be able to tell her about it with all its drama intact.

After he had told the story, and fulminated for a bit, and opened and drunk a beer, Anna said, “What you need is some way to bypass the political process.”

“Whoa babe. I’m not sure I want to know what you mean there.”

“I don’t know anyway.”

“Revolution, right?”

“No way.”

“A completely nonviolent and successful positive revolution?”

“Good idea.”

Nick appeared in the doorway. “Hey Dad, want to play some baseball?”

“Sure. Good idea.”

Nick seldom proposed this, it was usually Charlie’s idea, and so when Nick did it he was trying to make Charlie feel better, which just by itself worked pretty well. So they left the coolness of the house and played in the steamy backyard, under the blind eyes of the banked apartment windows. Nick stood against the brick back of the house while Charlie pitched wiffle balls at him, and he smacked them with a long plastic bat. Charlie tried to catch them if he could. They had about a dozen balls, and when they were scattered over the downsloping lawn, they re-collected them on Charlie’s mound and did it over again, or let Charlie take a turn at bat. The wiffle balls were great; they shot off the bat with a very satisfying plastic whirr, and yet it was painless to get hit by one, as Charlie often learned. Back and forth in the livid dusk, sweating and laughing, trying to get a wiffle ball to go straight.

Charlie took off his shirt and sweated into the sweaty air. “Okay here comes the pitch. Sandy Koufax winds up, rainbow curve! Hey why didn’t you swing?”

“That was a ball, Dad. It bounced before it got to me.”

“Okay here I’ll try again. Oh Jesus. Never mind.”

“Why do you say Jesus, Dad?”

“It’s a long story. Okay here’s another one. Hey, why didn’t you swing?”

“It was a ball!”

“Not by much. Walks won’t get you off de island mon.”

“The strike zone is taped here to the house, Dad. Just throw one that would hit inside it and I’ll swing.”

“That was a bad idea. Okay, here you go. Ooh, very nice. Okay, here you go. Hey come on swing at those!”

“That one was behind me.”

“Switch-hitting is a valuable skill.”

“Just throw strikes!”

“I’m trying. Okay here it comes, boom! Very nice! Home run, wow. Uh-oh, it got stuck in the tree, see that?”

“We’ve got enough anyway.”

“True, but look, I can get a foot onto this branch…here, give me the bat for a second. Might as well get it while we remember where it is.”

Charlie climbed a short distance up the tree, steadied himself, brushed leaves aside, reached in and embraced the trunk for balance, knocked the wiffle ball down with Nick’s bat.

“There you go!”

“Hey Dad, what’s that vine growing up into the tree? Isn’t that poison ivy?”