Fifty Degrees Below sitc-2 Read online

  This realization was a shock, small but profound, like the shove of shoulder to shoulder. Balance thrown off. Presumably it would come back after a while. Meanwhile a shudder, an itch, an ache. In short, desire.

  He found that he had become a seer of beauty in women. On the river path in Boston it was mostly expressed as youth and intelligence. That made sense; sixty degree-giving institutions, some three hundred thousand college students; that meant at least one hundred fifty thousand more nubile young women than ordinary demographics would suggest. Maybe that was why men stayed in Boston when their college years were over, maybe that explained why they were so intellectually hyperactive, so frustrated, so alcoholic, such terrible drivers. It all seemed right to Frank. He was full of yearning, the women on the river walk were all goddesses set loose in the sun. The image of Francesca Taolini even somehow made him angry; she had flirted with him casually, toyed with him. He wanted his Caroline to call him again, he wanted to kiss her and more. He wanted her.

  Back in Rock Creek Park it was not like that. Frank hiked in to the picnic tables late that night, and Zeno saw him and bellowed, “Hey it’s the Professor! Hey, wanna buy a fuck? She’ll do it for five dollars!”

  The guys jeered at this, while the woman sitting in their midst rolled her eyes and continued to knit. She’d heard it all before. Blond, square, stoical; Zeno and the rest were in fact pleased to have her there, they just showed it in stupid ways.

  “No thank you,” Frank said, and pulled a sixpack from a grocery bag to stop Zeno’s foolery before it went any further.

  The woman shook her head when offered a beer. “Day sixty-five,” she said to Frank with a brief gap-toothed smile. “Day sixty-five, and here I am still hanging out with these bozos.”

  “Yarrr!” they cheered.

  “Congratulations,” Frank said.

  “On what,” Zeno quipped, “staying sober, or hanging with us?”

  High humor in the park.

  There were very few women to be seen out there, Frank thought as he sat at her table; and those he saw seemed sad drabs, just barely getting by. Homelessness was hard on anyone, but seemed to damage them more. They could not pretend it was some kind of adventure.

  And yet the economy insisted on a minimum of five percent unemployment, to create the proper “wage pressure.” Millions of people who wanted jobs went unhired and therefore couldn’t afford a home, therefore suffered from “food insecurity,” so that businesses could keep wages low. These people.

  Unlike Frank. He was a dilettante here, dabbling, slumming. Choice made all the difference. He could have found a place to rent, he could have afforded a deposit and moved in. Instead he hung out tinkering with their crappy fire, then playing chess with Chessman, losing four games but making the last of them a real donnybrook. And when Chessman departed with his twenty, Frank got up and hiked into the night, made sure no one was following, went to his tree, called down Miss Piggy, and climbed up into his treehouse, there to lie down on the best bed in the world, and read by the light of his Coleman lantern, in the clatter of the wind in the leaves. Let the wind blow the world out of his hair. Rockabye baby, in the tree top. It was a relief to be there after the strangeness of the day.

  Was curly hair adaptive? Tangled curls, black as a crow’s wing?

  He wanted her.

  Damn it anyway. Sociobiology was a bad habit you could never get rid of. Once it invaded your thoughts it was hard to forget that human beings were apes, with desires shaped by life on the savannah, so that every move in lab politics or boardroom maneuvers became clearly a shove for food or sex, every verbal putdown from a male boss like the back of the hand from some hairy silverback, every flirt and dismissal from a woman like the head-turning-aside baboon, refusing acknowledgment, saying: You don’t get to fuck me and if you try my sisters will beat you up; and every acquiescence like the babs who accidentally had their pink butts stuck out when you went by, saying: I’m in estrus you can fuck me if you want, shouldering you companionably or staring off into space as if bored—

  But the problem was, thinking of interactions with other people in this way was not actually very helpful to him. For one thing it could often reduce him to speechlessness. Like at the gym for instance, my lord if that was not the savannah he didn’t know what was—and if that was the primal discourse, then he’d rather pass, thank you very much, and be a solitary. He was too inhibited to just lay it out there, and too honest to try to say it in euphemistic code. He was too self-conscious. He was too chicken. There was an awesome power in sex, he wanted it to go right. He wanted it to be part of a whole monogamy. He wanted love to be real. Science could go fuck itself!

  Or: become useful. Become a help, for God’s sake. It was the same in his personal life as it was for the world at large; if science wasn’t helping then it was a sterile waste of time. It had to help or it was all for naught, and the world still nothing but a miserable fuck-up. And him too.

  * * *

  The party traveling to Khembalung had grown to ten: the Quiblers and Frank, Drepung, Sucandra, Padma, and Rudra Cakrin, and the Khembali woman Qang, who ran the embassy’s big house in Arlington.

  Dulles to L.A. to Tokyo to Bangkok to Calcutta to Khembalung; for two days they lived in long vibrating rooms in the air, taking short breaks in big rooms on the ground. They ate meals, watched movies, went to the bathroom, and slept. In theory it should have been somewhat like a rainy weekend at home.

  However, Charlie thought, a rainy weekend at the Quibler household could be a royal pain in the ass. It was not a good idea to confine Joe for that long. At home they would make things for him to do, find ways for him to let off some steam. They would go out in the rain and party. Now that was not an option.

  They had flown business class, courtesy of the Khembalis, which gave them more room, though Anna could not help being concerned about the expense. Charlie told her not to worry about it, but she knew the Khembali budget and Charlie didn’t. She never found it reassuring when someone who knew less about a situation than she did told her not to worry about it.

  On the first plane Joe wanted to investigate every nook and cranny, and so Charlie followed him around, returning the smiles of those passengers who did in fact smile. Joe ran a route like a long figure 8, chanting “Airplane! Airplane! Airplane!” When the food and drink carts filled the aisles he had to be lifted into his seat, struggling as he declared “Airplane! Truck!” (the drink cart) “People!” Eventually he ran out of gas and fell asleep curled in his seat next to Rudra Cakrin, who nodded off over him, occasionally holding Joe’s wrist or ankle between two gnarled fingers. Anna sat on the other side of Joe, using up her laptop battery all in one go. Across the aisle from her Charlie sat down and pulled out the seatback phone to make some calls. Anna tried to ignore him and work, but she heard him say hi to Wade Norton, a colleague down in Antarctica, and listened in.

  “You saw twin otters? How did you know they were twins? … Oh. Uh huh. You saw Roosevelt Island, nice. How could that be the first time anyone has seen it? … Oh!… How many meters? … Where’d all the ice go? … Wow. Jesus. That is a lot… Is that the beginning of the … the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, right I know. Sea level and all. How big is this piece? Wow… Yeah, of course. We’ll be fine. We won’t be there but a few days anyway.”

  Charlie listened for a while. Then: “Hey, Roy! I’m glad you were able to click in. What’s up? … Andrea doesn’t? Hey does that mean you two are speaking to each other again? Ha ha… No, I don’t suffer under any illusions there, but Phil doesn’t listen to you guys either… Oh right. From the South Pole, I’m sure… I thought you said she was a giant… Six foot four sounds giant to me… You are not, you’re six feet at the most! Elevator shoes… She’d be what, six ten? Yeah. Ha… No, I think it’s his to lose! The happy man is like Hoover, and none of the other Republicans are happy men. They’re Angry Men. They’ve had the White House and Congress for so long it’s made them bitter. It’s just such an effo
rt making it look like their program makes sense. It makes them angry and resentful. No. It’s not a process you want to follow to its natural end. I agree… No, Phil would be fine. He’d love it. It’s us who would suffer, you know… Well, because I thought it was a good idea! What else are we going to do anyway? We’ve got to try something, and Phil is our best shot… I know. I know… Yeah, just ride it… Well, the more fool you! I’m off to Shambhala and Wade is at the South Pole. You can have D.C., ha!”

  He rang off, leaned back looking pleased.

  “You’re making trouble,” Anna observed.

  “Yes. Someone’s got to do it.”

  Hours later they floated down over the green fields of Japan, a startling sight if you were expecting nothing but Tokyo-like cityscapes. Then out of their seats, up a jetway, feeling slightly deranged; running around an airport acting as marshal or warden to a two-year-old minimum-security prisoner; then they were in another plane and rumbling into the air again, with another long day facing them. Nick kept on reading Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution. Charlie and Anna kept trading off the pursuit of the indefatigable Joe, Anna having given up making Charlie do it all, as they had both known she would. Besides, her battery was too low for her to keep working.

  Joe seemed intent on confirming what Anna kept telling him, that this plane was identical to the one they had been on before. Except on this one the passengers seemed less amused by an exploratory bang on the knee.

  Bangkok’s airport hotel, tall and white, stood over its big pool in intense sunlight. Dazed wandering after Joe in the turquoise shallows, trying to stay awake and unsunburnt, trying to keep Joe out of the deep end. The water was too warm. Then back to a cool room, sleep, but then the alarm oh my, middle of the night, ultragroggy, pack up and off to the airport again to face its long lines, and get on what looked like the same plane. Except on this one, orchids were pinned to the back of every seat. Joe ate his before they could stop him. Anna went into her laptop’s encyclopedia to see if it could have been toxic. Apparently it could, but Joe showed no ill effects, and Charlie ate a petal of his orchid too, in Anna’s view merely compounding the problem with a very poorly designed follow-up experiment.

  Nick had finished all his books, and now he listened as Charlie told Frank about Phil Chase running for president. Frank said, “What about you, Nick? Who do you think should be president?”

  Nick’s brow furrowed, and Frank glanced at Anna—yes, she could feel that same frown in the muscles of her own forehead. Nick was often his mother’s son. Now Frank watched him ponder, and Anna thought, It’s the oblivious confronting the oblivious: Frank unaware of being condescending, Nick unaware of being condescended to. Maybe that meant it wasn’t happening.

  “Well you see,” Nick said, “in Switzerland the executive branch is a seven-person council? And its members are voted in by the legislature. It means there’s diverse views in the executive branch, and it doesn’t dominate the other branches as much. Most Swiss people don’t even know the actual president’s name! He just like runs the council meetings.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Frank said.

  “The Swiss have lots of good ideas. We’ve been studying them in world gee.”

  “Oh I see. You’ll have to tell me more about them.”

  “It isn’t easy to amend the Constitution,” Charlie warned them.

  Nick and Frank knew this. Nick said, “Maybe someone could run for president and tell everybody that if he won, he was going to like appoint a council to do his job.”

  “Like Reagan!” Charlie said, laughing.

  “It’s still a good idea,” Frank said.

  Then their plane was descending again.

  In Calcutta they zombied through a reception at the Khembali legation, dreaming on their feet; all except Joe, who slept on Charlie’s back; then they tumbled into beds, feeling the joy of horizontality; then the alarm went off again. “Ah God.” It was almost like being at home.

  Back to the airport, off in a little sixteen-seater so loud that it made Joe squeal with joy. Up and east, over the mind-boggling combined delta of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the world’s largest delta, also a good percentage of Bangladesh. Looking down at it, Charlie shouted to Anna, “I’ll never call Washington, D.C., a swamp again!” Green-brown islands in a brown-green sea. The delta patterns ran south, and they flew down one brown-green channel until the islands lay more diffusely, also lower, many half-submerged, with drowned coastlines visible in shallows. The water ahead shifted in distinct jumps from brown-green to jade to sea blue.

  One of the outermost islands, right on the border of the jade sea and the blue, had a shoreline accentuated by a brown ring. As they descended, the interior of this island differentiated into patterns of color, then into fields, roads, rooftops. In the final approach they saw that the brown ring was a dike, quite broad and fairly high. Suddenly it appeared to Anna as if the land inside the dike was slightly lower than the ocean around it. She hoped it was only an optical illusion.

  Joe had mashed his face and hands against the window, looking down at the island and burbling: “Oh! My! Big truck! Big house! Ah fah. Oh! My!”

  Frank, who had successfully slept through three-quarters of the flight, sat up on the other side of Joe, regarding him with a smile. “Ooooooooop!” he gibboned, egging him on. Joe cackled to hear it.

  Touchdown.

  They were greeted as they came off the plane by a large group of men, women, and children, all dressed in their finery, which meant ceremonial garb better suited to the roof of the world than the Bay of Bengal; and on closer examination Anna saw that the fabrics of many of the robes and headdresses wafted on the stiff hot sea breeze, being diaphanous cotton, silk, and nylon, though they were Tibetan in color and design. That was Khembalung in a nutshell.

  Rudra Cakrin descended the plane first, with Drepung right behind him. A triumphant blaaaaaaaaaaaa of brass long horns shattered the air so violently it seemed it might squeeze out rain. This was the brazen sound that had alerted Anna to the existence of the Khembalis in the first place, on the day of their arrival in the NSF building.

  Everyone receiving them bowed; they looked down upon the black hair and colorful headgear of several hundred people. Joe goggled to see it, mouth hanging open in a perfect O.

  Descending into this throng they were surrounded by their hosts, including two women from the Khembalung Institute of Higher Learning, who introduced themselves to Anna; she had been corresponding with them by e-mail. They took the visitors in hand, leading them slowly through the crowd and introducing them to many of the people they passed.

  Soon they were through the airport’s little building, and bundled into a van that drove them east on a broad, palm-lined boulevard of dusty white concrete. On each side extended Hat fields, divided by rows of trees or shrubbery. Small building complexes stood under drooping palm trees. Many of the plants looked desiccated, even brown.

  “There has been drought for two years,” one of their guides explained. “This is the third monsoon season without rain, but we have hopes it will come soon. All South Asia has been suffering from these two bad monsoons in a row. We need the rain.”

  Anna had heard a lot about this from her contacts with ABC, the “Asian Brown Cloud” study, which was trying to determine if the long-term persistence of particulates in the air of south Asia—mysterious in their exact origins, although clearly linked to the industrialization and deforesting in the region— had any causal effect on the drought.

  In any case it made for a rather drab and stunted landscape. No plants they saw were native to the island, they were told as they drove through the dust cloud of the bus before theirs. Everything was tended; even the ground itself had been imported, to raise the island a meter or two higher. Nick asked where the extra ground had come from, and they told him that a few surrounding islands had been dredged up and deposited here, also used to provide the raw material for the dike. It had all been done under the di
rection of Dutch engineers some fifty years before. Very little had been done since then, as far as Anna had been able to determine. The dike was in sight through the trees wherever they went, raising the horizon a bit, so that it felt a little like driving around in a very large roofless room, blasted with hazy harsh sunlight, the sky like a white ceiling. The inner wall of the dike had been planted with flowerbeds that when in bloom would show the usual colors of the Tibetan palette— maroon and saffron, brown and bronze and red, all gone or muted now but the blue and black patches, which were made of painted stones.

  In a little town they got out of the van and crossed a broad pedestrian esplanade. The sea breeze poured over them in a hot wave, briny and seaweedy. The smell of the other Sundarbans, perhaps.

  “Will we see more swimming tigers?” Nick inquired. He observed everything with great interest, looking cool in his sunglasses. Joe had refused to wear his. He was taking in the scene so avidly he was in danger of giving himself whiplash, trying to see everything at once. Anna was pleased to see this curiosity from the boys; clearly America had not yet jaded them to the beauty and sheer difference of the rest of the world.

  Their guides took them in the biggest building, the Government House. It was darker inside, and with their sunglasses on, seemed at first black. By the time they had taken off sunglasses and adjusted to the relative gloom, they found Joe had run off ahead of them. The room displayed the post-and-beam construction characteristic of Himalayan buildings, and the rough-hewn posts in each corner were hung with demon masks.

  They followed Joe over to one of these collections. Each mask grimaced rotundly, almost exploding with fury, pain, repugnance. Stacked vertically they looked like a totem pole from a tribe of utter maniacs. Joe was embracing the bottom of the pole.

  “Oooh! Oooh! Big— big— big—”