Sixty Days and Counting (23 page)

And yet he wasn’t looking forward to it.

Then he saw that the smallest branches around him were studded with tiny green buds. They were the particular light vivid green that was still new to Frank, that he had never seen in his life until the previous spring, out in Rock Creek Park: deciduous bud green. An East Coast phenomenon. The color of spring. Ah yes: spring! Could spring ever be far behind? The so-called blocked moments, the times of stasis, were never really still at all. Change was constant, whether you could see it or not. Best then to focus on the new green buds, bursting out everywhere.

Thoreau said the same, the next morning. Frank read it aloud: “March fans it, April christens it, and May puts on its jacket and trousers. It never grows up, but is ever springing, bud following close upon leaf, and when winter comes it is not annihilated, but creeps on mole-like under the snow, showing its face occasionally by fuming springs and watercourses.”

Rudra nodded. “Henry sees things. ‘The flower opens, and lo! another year.’ ”

Thoughts of spring came to Frank often in the days that followed, partly because of the green now all over town, and partly because Chase kept referring to his first sixty days as a new spring. It struck Frank again when he went with Diane and Edgardo over to the White House to witness the dedication of the new solar projects. Phil had ordered that photovoltaic panels be put in place (be put back in place, as Carter had done it in his time) to power the White House. When there was some debate as to which system should be installed, he had instructed them to put in three or four different systems, to make a kind of test.

The purple-blue of the photovoltaic panels was like another kind of spring color, popping out in the snowy flowerbeds. Phil made a little speech, after which he was to be driven to Norfolk naval station; he had already had the Secret Service swap out his transport fleet, so now instead of a line of black SUVs pulling through the security gate, it was a line of black bulletproof Priuses. These looked so small that everyone laughed; they resembled the miniature cars that Shriners drove in parades. Chase laughed hardest of all, jumping out and directing the traffic so that the little cars made a circle around him. As he waved good-bye to the crowd, Frank noticed that he wore two wedding bands, one on his left ring finger, the other on the little finger of his right hand.

The White House demonstration project was only a tiny part of the solar power debate raging through NSF, the Department of Energy, and, Frank supposed, the world at large. Sudden effort to find the holy grail. It looked like desperation, and to a certain extent it was. But it was also that volatile time that came early in the history of any new technology, when decisions about many of the basic structures and methods emerged from a general confusion.

The small scale of this test was not going to be fair to Stirling engines in competition with photovoltaic. PV panels could be scaled to any size, which made them best for home use, while the external heat engine required a group of mirrors big enough to heat the heating element fully and drive the pistons to maximum output. It was a system meant for power plants. So the test here was only a PR thing. Still, not a bad idea. To see the systems creating electricity, even on cloudy days, was suddenly to understand that they had the means for the world’s deliverance already at hand. Paradoxically, the units on the south lawn shifted the attention from technology to finance. Now Chase was talking about tax credits for home installations that were big enough that the cost of a system would be the equivalent of about three years of electricity bills. A subsidy like that would make a huge difference. The cost to the federal budget would be about a tenth the cost of the last war. The main problem then would be manufacturing enough silicon.

One of the workmen scaling the southwest corner of the White House was having trouble, even though belayed from the roof. Frank shook his head, thinking: I could do better than that. Cutter and his friends could do better than that.

Kayaking was fun. The ice had broken up, and Frank, Charlie, and Drepung had joined a program at the Georgetown boathouse which gave them a couple of lessons, and then renting privileges for Charlie and Drepung; Frank had an old blue kayak of his own. Now their routine was to try to meet every other weekend to paddle around, playing on the slight riffles in the Potomac upstream from the Key Bridge. These riffles, however small compared to the drops at Great Falls, nevertheless involved an immense flow of water, and were fun to struggle up and shoot down. They could practice on them until they were good enough for Great Falls, Frank would say. Great Falls had a variety of white-water runs on the Maryland side, spanning a wide range of difficulties. Charlie and Drepung would nod at this information while glancing at each other, in full solidarity to resist any such improvement.

Drepung, it seemed to Charlie, was doing well, despite all the bustle at the embassy; in high spirits because of the move to the farm, and Phil taking office, and probably just the sheer fact of spring. He was young, the cherry blossoms were blossoming, and the Wizards were in the playoffs. He had an iPod that he had programmed with everything from the Dixie Chicks to the Diamond Sutra. Charlie often saw him bopping up their sidewalk in his oversized running shoes, snapping his fingers to some iPodded beat or other, not fast or slow, but in the groove. The bopper with the Betty Boop face, his gaze curiously fresh, direct, warm, open—a kind of hail, or greeting, even a challenge—a look unusual in D.C., the world capital of insincere sincerity.

Now Drepung paddled by and said, “I know that you said that when Phil Chase said to us,
I’ll see what I can do,
he was only using the usual Washington code for ‘No.’ But I am thinking now that maybe he meant it literally.”

“Could be,” Charlie opined cautiously. “What makes you think so?”

“Well, because he has apparently called up the State Department, and told someone in the South Asia division to get hold of us and set up a meeting with him. There’s even some of the China people to be included in this meeting.”

“Chinese people?”

“No, China people. State Department foreign service people who specialize in China. Sridar has been trying to set up such a meeting with them for months and months, but with no success. And now we have a date and an agenda of topics. And all because of this request from President Chase.”

“Amazing how that happens.”

“Yes, isn’t it? We are going to see what we can do!”

Later that spring, when the time came to move to Maryland, Frank drove Rudra out there in his van. Everything they had had in the garden shed barely covered the floor of the van’s rear. This was pleasing, but leaving their garden shed was not. As Frank closed and locked the door for the last time, he felt a pang of nostalgia. Another life gone. Some feelings were like vague clouds passing through one, others were as specific as the prick of acupuncture needles.

As they drove up the George Washington Parkway he still felt uneasy about leaving, and he thought maybe Rudra did too. He had left the garden shed without a look back, but now he was staring silently out at the Potomac. Very hard to tell what he might be thinking. Which was true of everyone of course.

The farm was bristling with people. They had built the treehouse in the hilltop grove, using Frank’s design but augmenting it in several ways. Once, right after they had begun to build it, he had tried to help in the actual construction of the thing, but when he saw some of the Khembali carpenters pulling out a beam that he had nailed in, he had realized that he had to leave the carpentry to them. They had built the thing at speed, not out of bamboo but out of wood, and in a very heavy
dzong
or hill fortress style, each room so varnished and painted with the traditional Tibetan colors for trim that they perched in the branches like giant toychests—rather wonderful, but not at all like the airy structures of the Disneyland masterpiece Frank had been conceptualizing. Frank wasn’t sure that he liked their version.

The overall design, however, had held. There was a grand central room, like a cottage that the biggest tree had grown through and uplifted thirty feet, so that now it hung in the middle of the copse. This circular room had an open balcony or patio all the way around it, and from this round patio several railed staircases and catwalks led over branches or across open space, out and up to smaller rooms, about a dozen of them.

Sucandra arrived and pointed out one of the lowest and outmost of the hanging rooms, on the river side of the hill: that one, he said, was to be Frank and Rudra’s. The roommates nodded solemnly; it would do. It definitely would do.

Late that day, having moved in, they looked back into the grove from their doorway and its own little balcony, and saw all the other rooms, their windows lit like lanterns in the dusk. On the inside their room was small. Even so their belongings looked rather meager, stacked in cardboard boxes in one corner. Sucandra and Padma and Qang all stood in the doorway, looking concerned. They had not believed Rudra’s assurances that the broad circular staircase and the narrow catwalk out the low branch would present no problems to him. Frank didn’t know whether to believe him either, but so far the old man had ascended and descended with only the help of the railing and some sulfurous muttering. And if problems arose, there was a kind of giant dumbwaiter or open lift next to the trunk, in which he could travel up and down. Even now they were using it to bring up their furniture—two single beds, a table and a couple of chairs, two small chests. Once all that was moved in the room looked larger than before, and more normal.

So. Here they were. Rudra sat before the window, looking down at the river. He had his laptop on the table, and he seemed content. “Very nice outlook,” he said, pointing out. “Nice to have such a view.”

“Yes,” Frank said, thinking of his treehouse in Rock Creek. Rudra would have enjoyed that. It might have been possible to lash the old man to Miss Piggy and then haul him up using the winch. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds.

But here they were. And in fact the view was much more extensive than Rock Creek’s had been. The sweep of the Potomac was now a glassy silver green, with bronze highlights under the far bank. Very nice. The expansion of space over the river, the big open band of sky over it, struck Frank with a kind of physical relief, a long ahhhhhhh. This was what you never got in the forest, this kind of open spaciousness. No wonder forest people loved their rivers—not just great roads for them, but the place of the sky and the stars!

In the days that followed, Frank woke at dawn to look out at this prospect, and saw at different times on the water highlights of yellow or rose or pink, and once it was a clean sheet of gold. These fine dawns were about the only time Frank saw the view; the rest of the day he was gone. Perhaps for that reason, he woke early, usually at first light. A mist would often be rolling over the glass, wisping up on puffs of wind. On windy mornings, waves would push upstream like a tide, although here they were above the tidal surge, and seeing only the wind chop. Sometimes it was enough to create little whitecaps, and their room would bounce and sway gently, in a way very unlike his old treehouse. There he had been on a vertical trunk, here a horizontal branch; it made a big difference.

In their new room Rudra did not talk as much as he had in Arlington. He slept a lot. But sometimes he would be sitting up in bed, humming or reading when Frank came home, or looking at his laptop screen, and then they would chat as before.

“Nice day?”

“Yes.”

“More salt in ocean?”

“Yes, precisely. What about you?”

“Oh, very nice day. Sun on water flicker so nicely. And some tantric websites, yum.”

“It’s like you’re back in Shambhala then.”

“No
like
. This
is
Shambhala.”

“So, it follows you around? It’s a kind of, what, a phase space, or a magnetic field around you, or something like that?”

“Buddhafield, I think you mean. No, Shambhala is not like that. The buddhafield is always there, yes. But that can be wherever you make one. Shambhala is a particular place. The first hidden valley. But the valley moves from time to time. We performed the ceremony that asked if it should be here. The spirits said yes.”

“Were you the, the what do you call it?”

“The voice? Oracle? No. I’m not strong enough anymore. Retired, like I told you. But Qang did well. Guru Rimpoche came to her and spoke. Khembalung is drowned for good, he said. Shambhala is now right here,” waving down at the river.

“Wow,” Frank said. As if on cue, when he looked out their window he saw the light of the rising moon, squiggling over the river in big liquid S’s. Suddenly it had a mysterious beauty.

Another time Frank was out on the river with Drepung and Charlie. They had kayaked out from the boathouse at the mouth of Rock Creek. Rock Creek where it debouched into the Potomac was still a very undistinguished little channel, raw from the great flood, all sand and sandstone and mangled trees.

On this day there was practically no downstream flow in the great river, and they were able to paddle straight across to Roosevelt Island and poke into the many little overhangs there, to look up the slope of the island park through forest. White-tailed deer, white-tailed deer; it was disturbing to Frank to see what a population boom there was in this species, a kind of epidemic. The native predators that were now returning, and the occasional exotic feral (the jaguar?) were nowhere near numerous enough to cull the flock. Big rabbits, as everyone called them. One had to remember they were wild creatures, big mammals, therefore to be loved. That vivid embrace with the doe. It was an old mistake not to value the common wildlife. They did that with people and look at the result.

So: deer; the occasional porcupine; foxes; once a bobcat; and birds. They were almost back to the old depopulate forest from the time before the flood. Frank found this depressing. He grew almost to hate the sight of the deer, as they were in some sense the cohort of humans, part of humanity’s own over-population surge. Then again, having them around beat a forest entirely empty; and from time to time he would catch a glimpse of something
other
. Brindled fur, striped flank, flash of color like a golden tamarind monkey; these and other brief signs of hidden life appeared. Because of the road bridges, Roosevelt Island was not really an island after all, but a sort of big wilderness peninsula. In that sense Teddy Roosevelt had the greatest D.C. monument of them all.