Fifty Degrees Below Read online

  He would need to make some daytime explorations, that was clear. He could always stay in his van, of course, but this felt more real. Scouting trips for the Feral Observation Group. We’re all in the fog now, Nancy had said. He would spend some of his time hunting for animals. A kind of return to the paleolithic, right here in Washington, D.C. Repaleolithization: it sounded very scientific, like the engineers who spoke of amishization when they meant to simplify a design. Landscape restoration inside the brain. The pursuit of happiness; and the happiness was in the pursuit.

  Frank smiled briefly. He realized he had been tense ever since leaving the rented apartment. Now he was more relaxed, watchful but relaxed, moving about easily. It was late, he was getting tired. Another branch across the face and he decided to call it a night.

  He made his way west to Connecticut, hit it at Fessenden, walked south on the sidewalk blinking in the flood of light. It might as well have been Las Vegas or Miami to him now, everything blazing neon colors in the warm spring night. People were out. He strolled along among them. The city too was a habitat, and as such a riot of sensation. He would have to think about how that fit in with the repaleolithization project, because the city was a big part of contemporary society, and people were obviously addicted to it. Frank was himself, at least to parts of it. The technological sublime made everything magical, as if they were all tripping with the shaman—but all the time, which was too much. They had therefore lost touch with reality, gone mad as a collective.

  And yet this street was reality too. He would have to think about all this.

  When he came to his van no one was in sight, and he slipped inside and locked the doors. It was dark, quiet, comfortable. Very much like a room. A bit stuffy; he turned on the power, cracked the windows. He could start the engine and power the air conditioner for a while if he really needed to.

  He set his wristwatch alarm for 4:30 A.M., afraid he might sleep through the dawn in such a room. Then he lay down on his familiar old mattress, and felt his body start to relax even further. Home sweet home! It made him laugh.

  At 4:30 his alarm beeped. He squeezed it quiet and slipped on his running shoes and got out of the van before his sleepiness knocked him back down. Out into the dawn, the world of grays. This was how cats must see, all the grays so finely gradated. A different kind of seeing altogether.

  Into the forest again. The leafy venation of the forest air was a masterpiece of three-dimensionality, the precise spacing of everything suggesting some kind of vast sculpture, as in an Ansel Adams photo. The human eye had an astonishing depth of field.

  He stood over the tawny sandstone of Rock Creek’s newly burnished ravine, hearing his breathing. It was barely cool. The sky was shifting from a flat gray to a curved pale blue.

  “Oooooooooop!”

  He shivered deep in his flesh, like a horse.

  The sound came from overhead; a rising “oooooooooo” that then suddenly fell. Something like the cooing of a dove, or the call of a coyote. A voice, or a kind of siren—musical, unearthly, bizarre. Glissandos up and down. Voices, yes. Gibbons and/or siamangs. Frank had heard such calls long ago, at the San Diego Zoo.

  It sounded like there were several of them now. “Ooooop! Ooooooooooop! Oooooooooooop!”

  Lows to highs, penetrating and pure. The hair on Frank’s neck was sticking out.

  He tried it himself. “Ooooooop!” he sang, softly. It seemed to fit in. He could do a fair imitation of one part of their range. His voice wasn’t as fluid, or as clear in tone, and yet still, it was somewhat the same. Close enough to join in unobtrusively.

  So he sang with them, and stepped ever so slowly between the trees, looking up trying to catch a glimpse of them. They were feeding off each other’s energy, sounding more and more rambunctious. Wild animals! And they were celebrating the new day, there was no doubt about it. Maybe even celebrating their freedom. There was no way to tell, but to Frank it sounded like it.

  Certainly it was true for him—the sound filled him, the morning filled him, spring and all, and he bellowed “Oooooooopee oop oop!” voice cracking at its highest. He longed to sing higher; he hooted as loudly as he could. The gibbons didn’t care. It wasn’t at all clear they had even noticed him. He tried to imitate all the calls he was hearing, failed at most of them. Up, down, crescendo, decrescendo, pianissimo, fortissimo. An intoxicating music. Had any composer ever heard this, ever used this? What were people doing, thinking they knew what music was?

  The chorus grew louder and more agitated as the sky lightened. When sunlight pierced the forest they all went crazy together.

  Then he saw three of them in the trees, sitting on high branches. He saw their long arms and longer tails, their broad shoulders and skinny butts. One swung away on arms that were as long as its body, to land on a branch by another, accept a cuff, and hoot some more. Again their raucous noise buffeted Frank. When they finally quieted down, after an earsplitting climax, the green day was upon them.

  SENATOR PHIL CHASE SAID, “YOU KNOW, it’s not a question of you being right and me being wrong.”

  “Of course not,” Charlie Quibler replied.

  Phil grinned. “We all agreed that global warming was real.”

  “Yes, of course we did.”

  “No!” Joe Quibler murmured as he drowsed on Charlie’s back.

  Phil laughed to hear it. “You’ve got a lie detector there.”

  “Going off all the time, in this company.”

  “Ha ha. Looks like he’s waking up.”

  Charlie glanced over his shoulder. “I better start walking.”

  “I’ll join you. I can’t stand any more of this anyway.”

  They were at the Vietnam Memorial, attending a ceremony to mark its reopening. Phil, a veteran who had served as an Army reporter in Saigon for a year, had said a few words; then the president had shown up, but only near the end, the feeling among his people being that this was one memorial that would be better left buried in the mud. After that Phil was forgotten by the press on hand, which did not surprise him; but Charlie could tell by the slight tightness at the corner of his mouth that the calculated back of the hand to Vietnam had irritated him.

  In any case they were free to leave. Normally Phil would have been whisked by car up the Mall to his offices, but a cancellation had opened a half-hour slot in his schedule. “Let’s go say hi to Abe,” he muttered, and turned them west. Offering this gift of time to Charlie; it was as close to an apology as Charlie would ever get.

  A month earlier, right before the flood, Charlie had helped craft a giant bill for Phil, designed to jumpstart a real engagement with the climate-change problem. Then, in the last phase of intense committee negotiations, Phil had dismantled the bill to get a small part of it passed, effectively destroying the rest. He had promised Charlie he wouldn’t, but he had; and had done so without warning Charlie.

  At the time Charlie had been furious. Phil had shrugged him off. “I am only doing the necessary,” he said, in his version of an Indian accent. “I must first be doing the necessary.”

  But Charlie did not believe it had been necessary. And it did not help that since the flood Phil had been widely hailed as a prophet on the climate issue. Phil had laughed at this little irony, had thanked Charlie, had ignored with aplomb all Charlie’s explicit and implied I-told-you-so’s. “It’s all really a compliment to you, Charles—to you and your unworkable brilliance.”

  “Um hmm,” Charlie said. “Yeah right.”

  He was enjoying the situation too much to invent his side of the banter. Two old colleagues, out for a walk to the Lincoln monument; it was the rarest thing in town.

  Landscaping equipment dotted the newly restored bank of the Potomac, and the background buzz of the city was augmented by their noise. The violent diesel huffing and puffing might have startled some sleeping children awake, but it served as a lullaby to Joe Quibler; the noise of trucks shifting gears on Wisconsin was his usual soporific, and he loved all big grinding sounds.
So now he snoozed happily on, head nestled into the back of Charlie’s neck as they approached the memorial, nudging Charlie as always into the genomic sublime.

  This part of the Mall had been twenty feet under the rush of the Potomac during the flood, and being landfill to begin with it had not put up very much resistance to the spate; much of it had been torn away, leaving the Lincoln Memorial an island in the stream. “Check it out,” Charlie said to Phil, pointing up at the big white foursquare building. There was a dark horizontal line partway up it. “High-water mark. Twenty-three feet above normal.”

  Phil frowned at the sight. “You know, the goddammed House is never going to appropriate enough money to clean up this city.”

  Senators and their staffs often had an immense disdain for the House of Representatives. “True.”

  “It’s too much like one of their Bible prophecies, what was that one?”

  “Noah’s flood? Revelation?”

  “Maybe. Anyway they’re loving it. No way they’re going to allocate money to interfere with God’s judgment. That would be bad. That would be worse than, than what—than raising taxes!”

  “Joe’ll wake up if you yell like that.”

  “Sorry. I’ll calm down.”

  Joe rolled his head on Charlie’s neck. “No,” he said.

  “Ha,” Phil said, grinning. “Caught in another one.”

  Charlie could just glimpse the boy’s red cheek and furrowed brow. He could feel Joe’s agitation; clearly he was once more locked into one of his mighty dreams, which from his sleeping scowls and jerks appeared to be fierce struggles, filled with heartfelt Nos. Joe awakened from them with big sighs of relief, as if escaping to a quieter, lesser reality, a kind of vacation cosmos. It worried Charlie.

  Phil noticed Joe’s distress, patted his damp head. Step by broad step they ascended the Memorial.

  To Phil this place was sacred ground. He loved Lincoln, had studied his life, often read in the nine volumes of his collected works. “This is a good place,” he said as he always did when visiting the memorial. “Solid. Foursquare. Like a dolmen. Like the Parthenon.”

  “Especially now, with all the scaffolding.”

  Phil looked in at the big statue, still stained to the knees, a sight that made him grimace. “You know, this city and the Federal government are synonymous. They stand for each other, like when people call the administration ‘the White House.’ What is that, metonymy?”

  “Metonymy or synecdoche, I can never remember which.”

  “No one can.” Phil walked inside, stopped short at the sight of the stained inner walls. “Damn it. They are going to let this city sink back into the swamp it came out of.”

  “That’s synecdoche I think. Or the pathetic fallacy.”

  “Pathetic for sure, but how is it patriotic? How do they sell that?”

  “Please Phil, you’re gonna wake him up. They have it both ways, you know. They use code phrases that mean something different to the Christian right than to anyone else.”

  “Like the beast will be slain or whatnot?”

  “Yes, and sometimes even more subtle than that.”

  “Ha ha. Clerics, everywhere you look. Ours are as bad as the foreign ones. Make people hate their government at the same time you’re scaring them with terrorists, what kind of program is that?” Phil drifted through the subdued crowd toward the left wall, into which was incised the Gettysburg Address. The final lines were obscured by the flood’s high-water mark, a sight which made him scowl. “They had better clean this up.”

  “Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all.”

  “Abraham Lincoln was no Republican.”

  “Hello?”

  “The Republicans in Congress hated him like poison. The goddammed Copperheads did everything they could to sabotage him. They cheered when he was killed, because then they could claim him as a martyr and rip off the South in his name.”

  “Limited value in hitting them with that now.”

  “But it’s still happening! I mean whatever happened to government of the people by the people and for the people not perishing from this earth?” Pointing at the marred lines on the wall, looking as heavily symbolic as an image in a Cocteau film.

  “An idea that lost?” Charlie said, spurring him on.

  “Democracy can’t lose. It has to succeed.”

  “ ‘Democracy will never succeed, it takes up too many evenings.’ ”

  “Ha. Who said that?”

  “Oscar Wilde.”

  “Please. I mean, I see his point, but don’t quote Oscar Wilde to me when I’m trying to think like Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Wilde may be more your level.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Wilde was witty just like that.”

  “Ha ha ha.”

  Charlie gave up tweaking Phil in favor of contemplating the mud-stained statue of the sixteenth president. It was a great work: massive, brooding, uneasy. The big square-toed boots and obviously handmade broadcoat somehow evoked the whole world of the nineteenth-century frontier. This was the spirit that America had given to the world—its best gesture, its exemplary figure.

  His oversized hands were dirty. The great bearded head looked sadly over them. The whole interior space of the building had a greatness about it—the uncanny statue, the high square ceiling, the monumental lettering of the speeches on the side walls, the subdued people visiting it. Even the kids there were quiet and watchful.

  Perhaps it was this that woke Joe. He yawned, arched back in his seat, whacked Charlie on the head. “Down! Down!”

  “Okay okay.”

  Charlie went back outside to let him down. Phil came along, and they sat on the top step and let Joe stretch his legs behind them.

  A TV crew was working at the bottom of the steps, filming what looked to be a story on the memorial’s reattachment to land. When the reporter spotted them, he came up to ask Phil if he would make a comment for the program.

  “My pleasure,” Phil said. The reporter waved his crew over, and soon Phil was standing before the camera in a spot where Lincoln loomed over his left shoulder, launching into one of his characteristic improvs. “I’m sick of people putting Washington down,” he said, waving a hand at the city. “What makes America special is our constitution, and the laws based on it—it’s our government that makes America something to be proud of, and that government is based here. So I don’t like to see people wrapping themselves in the flag while they trash the very country they pretend to love. Abraham Lincoln would not stand for it—”

  “Thanks, Senator! I’m sure we can use that. Some of it, anyway.”

  “I should hope so.”

  Then a shout of alarm came from inside the building, causing Charlie to shoot to his feet and spin around, looking for Joe—no luck. “Joe!” he cried, rushing inside.

  Past the pillars he skidded to a halt, Phil and the TV crew crashing in behind him. Joe was sitting up on Lincoln’s knee, far above them, looking around curiously, seemingly unaware of the long drop to the marble floor.

  “Joe!” Charlie tried to catch his attention without causing him to topple off. “Joe! Don’t move! Joe! Stay there!”

  How the hell did you get up there, he didn’t add. Because Lincoln’s marble chair was smooth and vertical on all sides; there was no way up it even for an adult. It almost seemed like someone had to have lifted him up there. Of course he was an agile guy, a real monkey, very happy on the climbing structures at Gymboree. If there was a way, he had the will.

  Charlie hustled around the statue, hoping to find Joe’s route up and follow it himself. There was no way. “Joe! Stay right there! Stay right there till we get you!”

  A group was gathering at Lincoln’s feet, ready to catch Joe if he fell off. He sat there looking down at them with an imperial serenity, completely at ease. The TV cameraman was filming everything.

  The best Charlie could think to do was to request a boost from two willing young men, and clamber onto their shoulder
s as they stood on Lincoln’s right boot and wrapped their arms around his calf. From there Charlie could reach up with his arms and almost touch Joe, although at that point it was a balancing act, and things were precarious. He had to talk Joe into toppling over into his hands, which of course took a while, as Joe was clearly happy where he was. Eventually, however, he tipped forward and Charlie caught him, and let him down between his legs onto the two young men and a nest of hands, before falling back himself into the arms of the crowd.

  The crowd cheered briefly, then gave them a little round of applause. Charlie thanked the two young men as he collected the squirming Joe from other strangers.

  “Jesus, Joe! Why do you do these things?”

  “Look!”

  “Yeah yeah, look. But how the hell did you get up there?”

  “Up!”

  Charlie took some deep breaths, feeling a bit sick to his stomach. If the TV station ran the story, which they probably would, and if Anna saw it, which she probably wouldn’t, then he would be in big trouble. But what could you do? He had only taken his eye off him for a second!

  Phil got back in front of the camera with them, increasing the chances it would make it to the news. “This is my young friend Joe Quibler and his father Charlie, a member of my staff. Good job, you guys. You know, citizens like Joe are the ones we have to think about when we consider what sort of world we’re going to be handing along to them. That’s what government is, it’s making the world we want to give to our kids. People should think about that before they put down Washington, D.C., and our country’s government. Lincoln would not approve!”

  Indeed, Lincoln stared down at the scene with a knowing and disenchanted air. He looked concerned about the fate of the republic, just as Phil had implied.

  The reporter asked Phil a few more questions, and then Phil signaled that he had to go. The TV crew shut down, and the little crowd that had stayed to watch dissipated.

  Phil phoned his office to get a car sent, and while they waited he shook some hands. Charlie roamed the sanctum with Joe in his arms, looking for routes up to the great American’s lap. There were some disassembled scaffolds stacked on their sides against the back wall of the chamber, behind Lincoln and next to an inner pillar; it was just conceivable that Joe had monkeyed up those. Easier than doing a diretissima up Lincoln’s calf, but still. It was hard to figure.