Fifty Degrees Below (46 page)

“Sure but hey listen, can you make a call to the Khembali embassy house in Arlington? They’re not under his surveillance are they?”

“I don’t think so. Who are they?”

“Embassy of Khembalung, their house is in Arlington. I’m staying there now and so you can call me there whenever you get free. In the evenings I’ll likely be around.”

“Okay I’ll look for a chance and call soon. I’m so sorry about this. He’s changed jobs again and it’s getting really complicated.”

“That’s okay, I’m just glad to hear from you!”

“Yeah I bet, I mean I would be too. I’ll call real soon okay?”

“Okay.”

“Love you bye.”

It was amazing how much better he felt. Lack of affect was clearly not his problem; on the contrary, he had to avoid being overwhelmed by feelings. Giddy with relief, happy, worried, pleased, in love, frightened: but what did all those feelings combined add up to? This was what the studies never seemed to discuss, that you could feel so many different things at the same time. He felt
Caroline.
The uncanny presence of their elevator box, standing there before him throughout their conversation, had given him a palpable sense of her, an instant connection from the moment she spoke. Some quality in her voice drew his affections out. He wanted her to be happy. He wanted to be with her.

Leap before you look, stop trying to decide, just act on the spur of the moment. On Saturday he went over to Rock Creek, first to move most of his stuff from his tree house to his van, then to play a round with Spencer and Robert and Robin. The frisbees still tended to shatter if they hit a tree straight on, but other than that the frisbee guys seemed fine with the hard winter. Spencer said it was the same with all the fregans. They were Ice Age people, running with the aurochs and the wolves.

And the bros were back by their fire, stubbornly waiting out the cold. The pile of ashes in their fireplace was huge, and the area beyond Sleepy Hollow where the deer carcasses lay was beginning to look like a real shambles. Fedpage handed Frank a paper plate with a scorched venison steak when he sat down at the picnic table.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. It’s a little bloody, but—”

“Blood for the hemophiliac! Just what he needs!”

“Uh huh. Hey Fedpage, how many spy agencies are there in the federal government?”

“Sixteen.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s how many they admit to. Actually there’s more. It’s like those Russian nested dolls, with blacks and superblacks inside.”

“Spy versus spy.”

“That’s right. They fight like dogs. They guard their turf by getting blacker.” This statement made Cutter laugh. “Nobody even knows everything that’s out there, I judge. Not the president nor anyone else.”

“How can that happen?”

“There’s no enemy, that’s why. They pretend there’s terrorists, but that’s just to scare people. Actually they like terrorists. That’s why they went into Iraq, they got oil and a bunch of terrorists, it was a two-for-one. Much smarter than Vietnam. Because it’s all about funding. The spooks’ job is to spy on each other and keep their funding.”

“Shit,” Frank said. He prodded his steak, which suddenly tasted off. “I think you guys need to kill another deer maybe.”

“Ha nothing wrong with that deer! It’s Fedpage making you sick!”

On some afternoons Frank walked around Arlington. He had never spent much time there, and this was an odd time to get acquainted with it, its big streets were so wintry. Broad avenues ran for miles westward, past knots of tall buildings erupting out of the forest in every kind of mediocre urban conglomeration. It was possible to walk to the Khembali house from NSF in half an hour, so some days he did that, and got in a winter hike through the snow’s bizarre masonry, with cars belching past like steam-powered vehicles.

At night after dinner he usually went up to his room and read on his mattress, chatting with Rudra every half hour or so. Otherwise he drifted around on the internet, looking things up under the long list of sites that came when he googled Khembalung. What he read in these rambles often caused him to shake his head.

before the great guru Milarepa left Tibet for the Glorious Copper-Colored Mountain, he made a tour of Tibet, among other tasks finding hidden valleys, or beyuls

“Guru Rudra, what is a
beyul
?”

“Hidden valley.”

“Like Khembalung?”

“Yes.”

“But you were on an island?”

“Hidden valley moves from time to time. This seems to be what Rikdzin Godem says. He was the guru who knew about the hidden valley. From Tsang. Fourteenth century. He talked about the Eight Great Hidden Valleys, but Khembalung seems to be only one that ever appeared. A refuge from the kaliyuga, fourth of the four ages. Iron age of degradation and despair.”

“Is that what we’re in?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“Ha ha. What else did he say about them?”

“He say many things. Many books. He told location and described how to get in. When it would be good to enter, what would be the omens. What say, the power places in Khembalung. The magic.”

“Oh my. And what was that?”

“Like Khembalung as you saw it. A place for good. A buddhafield.”

“Buddhafield?”

“A space where Buddhism is working.”

“I see.”

“Compassion increase, wisdom.”

“And Khembalung was like that.”

“Yes.”

“And where was it, before your island?”

“At head of Arun valley. Phumchu, we call it in Tibetan. And over Tsibri La, into Tibet. That was the trouble.”

“China?”

“Yes.”

“Why is China so much trouble, do you think?”

“China is big. Like America.”

“Ah. So you left there.”

“Yes. South gate in a cave, opens way down Phumchu. Then downvalley to Darjeeling.”

“Does anyone go through that hidden valley anymore?”

“They go through without seeing. Too busy!” A gravelly chuckle. “Buddhafield not always visible. In this case, Dorje Phakmo, the Adamantine Sow, lies along that valley.”

“A pig?”

“Subtle body, hard to find.”

Another time, because of that:

“So animals are kind of magical too?”

“Of course. Obvious when you see them, right?”

“True,” Frank said. He told Rudra about his activities with FOG, including the arrival in Rock Creek Park of the aurochs.

“Very good!” Rudra exclaimed. “I liked them.”

“Uh huhn. What about tigers?”

“Oh, I like them too. Very good animal. Scary, but good. They have scary masks, but really they are friendly helpers. At power places they are tame.”

“Tame?”

“Tame. Friendly, helpful, courteous.”

“Kind, obedient, cheerful, brave, clean, and reverent?”

“Yes. All those.”

“Hmm.”

Another time, Frank read a passage on his screen and said, “Rudra, are you
the
Rudra Cakrin, the one people write about?”

“No.”

“You’re not? There’s more than one?”

“Yes. He is very old.”

“Sixteen thousand years before the birth of Christ, it says here.”

“Yes, very old. I am not that old.” Gurgle. “Almost, but not.”

“So are you some kind of boddhisattva?”

“No no. Not so good as that, no.”

“But you are a lama, or what say, a tulku or what have you?”

“What have you, I guess you say. I am a voice.”

“A voice?”

“You know. Vehicle for voice. Spirits seem to speak through me.”

“Like in those ceremonies, you get taken over and say things?”

“Yes.”

“That looks like it must hurt.”

“Yes, it seems so. I don’t remember what happens then. But afterward I often seem to be sore.”

“Does it still happen?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you scheduled for a ceremony anytime soon?”

“No. You know—retired.”

“Retired?”

“Is that not word? What say, get old, give up work?”

“Yes, that’s retirement. I just didn’t know that your kind of job allowed for retirement.”

“Of course. Very hard job.”

“I imagine so.”

Frank googled “oracle, Tibetan Buddhist,” and read randomly for a while. It was pretty alarming stuff. What always got him was how elaborated everything was in Tibetan Buddhism; it was not a simple thing, like he imagined American Protestant churches being, with their simple creeds: I believe in God, an abstract or maybe a human image, with some vague tripartite divisions and a relatively straightforward story about a single visit to Earth. Not at all; instead, a vastly articulated system of gods and spirits, with complicated histories and interactions, and ongoing appearances in this world. The oracles when possessed would grow taller, lift enormously heavy costumes, cause medallions on their chest to bounce outward under the force of their elevated heartbeat. If certain powerful spirits entered the oracle, he had less than five minutes to live. Blood would gush from nose and mouth, body go completely rigid.

Maybe this was all a matter of adrenalin and endorphins. Maybe this was what the body was capable of when the mind was convinced of something. Oxytocined by the cosmic spirit. But in any case they were quite serious about it; to them it was real. “The system is so complex and multilayered that it operates with some degree of freedom.” The mind, ordering the incoming data one way or another; different realities, perhaps. And what if they were evaluated on the basis of how they made one feel? On that basis there was certainly no justification to condescend to these people, no matter what strange things they said. They were in far better control of their feelings than Frank was.

Through all of March the winter stayed as cold and windy as ever. Twelve days in a row record lows were set, and on March 23rd it was twenty below at noon. Frank worried that any trees that had survived the worst of the winter would have their blooms killed in the frigid spring; and then where would they be? What would the East Coast be like if its great hardwood forest died? Would whole biomes collapse as a result, would agriculture itself be substantially destroyed? How would Europe feed itself? What might happen to Asia’s already shaky food security? It seemed to him sometimes that a winter this severe might change things for good.

In this context the campaign for the presidential election coming up in the fall looked more trivial than ever. Phil Chase wrapped up the Democratic nomination, the president’s team upped the firepower of their attacks on him; the SSEEP virtual candidate caused trouble for everybody who came in contact with it. Frank couldn’t be bothered, and it seemed there were others like him out there. The long winter came first in the news and in people’s thoughts.

HALFWAY THROUGH APRIL THE INCREASING LENGTH of the days became impossible to miss. Spring was here, snow or not. Daylight savings time came, and even though the mornings were darker at first, that did not last long. By the first of May there was so much more light that there simply had to be more heat; and then one day without warning it hit eighty degrees, and everyone and everything sweltered. The whole world steamed, thawed branches drooped and hung, thawed pipes leaked, wires shorted, mold grew. It was like a permafrost melt in the tundra, with pingos and polygonal cracking and fields of new mud, and the air stifling. Mosquitoes came back, and everyone began to wonder if the hard winter had really been that bad after all.

When Frank visited Rock Creek he found Cutter on Connecticut again, using his old orange cones and orange tape to clear space around a tree canted at a forty-five-degree angle.

“How’s it going?”

“Pretty good! Spring has sprung!”

“Did the trees live?”

“Most of them yeah. Lot of dead branches. It’ll make for a busy summer. I swear the forest gonna take over this city.”

“I bet. Can I join you sometime?”

“Sure you can. Do you own a chainsaw?”

“No, can’t say I do.”

“That’s all right. There’s other help you can do.”

“I can always drag wood away.”

“Exactly.”

“So where do you take the wood if you’re doing something like this on your own?”

“Oh all kinds of places. I take it to a friend’s and we cut it up for firewood.”

“And that’s okay?”

“Oh sure. There’s an awful lot of trees need trimming. Lot of it being done by freelancers. The city need help, and the wood can be the pay.”

“It sounds like it works pretty well.”

“Well . . .” Cutter laughed.

“Hey, did you ever find out anything more about Chessman?”

“No, not really. I asked Byron but he didn’t know. He said he thought maybe he moved. There was a chess tournament up in New York he said Chessman talked about.”

“He said something about playing in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did Byron know his name?”

“He said he thought his name was Clifford.”

All the branches sprouted green buds. Tiny buds of a vivid light green, a color Frank had never seen before, a color that glowed on cloudy days, and sparked in his peripheral vision like fireflies. Green buds on a wet black bough, life coming back to the forest. It could not have been more beautiful. No moment in the Mediterranean climate could ever match this moment of impossible green.

He started going over to the park again, while at the same time he felt less anxious about living at the embassy house.

And yet he never returned to feeling quite himself. His face was still numb, inside his nose and right below it, and behind it. When he was shaving he saw that the numb part of his upper lip looked inert, and thus to himself he seemed deformed. He could not smile properly. He didn’t know how he felt about that. He supposed that the effect for others was slight, and that if noticed at all people did not talk about it, out of politeness.

The bros did not worry about that kind of thing. “Hey Jimmy! Jimmy Durante! How’s it hanging, did your dick survive its frostbite? That scared ya didn’t it! Did your nose heal straight? Can you breathe through it anymore?”

“No.”

“HA ha ha. Hey Mouthbreather! I knew you wouldn’t be able to the first time I saw it.”