Sixty Days and Counting (26 page)

“But where’s the money going to come from?” someone asked.

“The military budgets of the world equal about a trillion dollars a year,” Frank noted, “half of that coming from the United States. Maybe we can’t afford to throw that work away anymore. Maybe the money could be reallocated. And we do need a really big manufacturing capacity here. What if the entire military-industrial complex, funded by these enormous budgets, were redirected to the projects we are outlining? How long would it take for the global effects to be measurable?”

Dream on, someone muttered.

Others thought it over, or punched numbers into their handhelds, testing out possibilities. Of course redirecting the military budgets of the world was “unrealistic.” But it was worth bringing it up, Frank judged, to suggest the size of the world’s industrial capacity. What could be done if humanity were not trapped in its own institutions? “To wrest Freedom from the grasp of Necessity,” Frank said. “Who said that?”

People in the meeting were beginning to look at him strangely again. Dream on, oh desperate fool, their looks said. But it wasn’t just him who was desperate.

“You’re beginning to sound like the Khembalis,” Anna said. But she liked that, she was pleased by that. And if Anna approved, Frank felt he must in some sense be on the right track.

By the time they were done with that meeting it was late, the wind barreling through the empty streets of the federal district.

“What about dinner?” Diane said to Frank when they had a moment in private, and Frank nodded. She said, “I still don’t know any restaurants around here, but we can look.”

“Maybe over toward the Capitol. For some reason the whole area around George Washington University is pretty dead this late at night, I don’t know why.”

“Let’s see what we find.”

And off they went, on another date in the nation’s capital.

It was a fun date. They found a Greek restaurant, and sat across a little table and talked over the meeting and the day and everything else. Frank drank a glass of retsina, a glass of ouzo, and a cup of Greek coffee, all while wolfing down dolmades, sliced octopus arms in oil, and moussaka. He laughed a lot. Looking across the table at Diane’s round face, so vivacious and intelligent, so charismatic and powerful, he thought: I love this woman.

He could not think about the feeling. He shied away from the thought and just felt it. Everything else at the moment was unreal, or at least nonpresent. He focused on the present in the way Rudra was always encouraging him to do. The advantages of such a focus were evident in a certain calmness that spread through him, a feeling that might have been happiness. Or maybe it was the food, the alcohol, the caffeine. The tastes and looks and sounds. Her face. Were those what happiness consisted of? A smile, a glance, as the old man had said—what ample borrowers of eternity they are!

Afterward they walked back to the compound, and Frank walked her to her car in the underground parking lot.

“Good night, that was nice.”

“Yes it was.” She looked up and Frank leaned over, their lips met in a perfect little kiss, and off he went.

He drove to the Khembali farm with his heart all aflutter. He didn’t know what he thought. Rudra was asleep and he was glad, and then sorry. He tried to sleep and could not sleep. Finally he sat up and turned on his laptop.

Thoreau was a solitary. He fell in love with his brother’s girlfriend, and proposed to her after his brother had proposed to her and been turned down. Henry too was turned down. There were rumors the girl’s father did not think the Thoreaus were good enough. But if she had insisted…Anyway Henry became a solitary. “There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.”

That night the website had something from his journal:

I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me. Very significant are the flight of the geese and the migration of suckers, etc., etc. But when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here,—the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc.,—I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country. Would not the motions of those larger and wilder animals have been more significant still? Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all its warriors. When I think what were the various sounds and notes, the migrations and works, and changes of fur and plumage which ushered in the spring and marked the other seasons of the year, I am reminded that this my life in nature, this particular round of natural phenomena which I call a year, is lamentably incomplete. I list to a concert in which so many parts are wanting. The whole civilized country is to some extent turned into a city, and I am that citizen whom I pity. All the great trees and beasts, fishes and fowl are gone.

From his journal, March 23, 1856; he had been thirty-eight years old. What would he think now, after another century and a half of destruction and loss? Maybe he would not have been surprised. He had seen it already started. Frank groaned.

“What wrong?”

“Oh nothing. Sorry I woke you.”

“I was not sleeping. I don’t sleep much.”

“You sounded like you were sleeping.”

“No.”

“Maybe you were dreaming.”

“No. What wrong?”

“I was thinking about all the animals that are in trouble. In danger of extinction. Thoreau was writing about the predators being wiped out.”

“Ah well. You still see animals in park?”

“Yes, but mostly just deer now.”

“Ah well.”

Rudra fell back asleep. After a while Frank drifted into uneasy dreams. Then he was awake again and thinking about Diane. He wasn’t going to fall asleep; it was four. He got up and made his way out of the treehouse and across the farm to his van. Back into the city, down Connecticut from the already-crowded Beltway. Left on Brandywine, park on Linnean, get out and cross Broad Branch, and thus out into Rock Creek Park.

He hiked around the rim of the new gorge, and saw nothing but a single deer. He hiked up to Fort de Russey, back down on the eastern wild way, and saw nothing but a trio of deer, standing upslope like wary statues. He decided as he watched them that he would be the predator—that he would scare these creatures, and at the same time test his ability, and see how long he could keep them in sight, not as a stalker, but a predator in pursuit. He set the timer on his wristwatch to zero, clicked it and took off after them, up the open forest floor with its black soil underfoot, sprinting hard. They bolted over the nearest ridge, he flew up to it—no deer to be seen! Empty forest! But where had they—he stopped his watch. 4.82 seconds. He barked a laugh and stood there for a while, panting.

When he started walking again he headed toward Site 21, to see if the guys were there and check in with his treehouse.

Except from a distance he saw that something was wrong with it. He ran to it, trying to understand the gap in the air. When he got to it he saw it had been cut down.

He inspected the trunk. Cut by a chain saw, a smallish one it seemed by the sweep of the cut marks. The tree had fallen across Rock Creek; you could have used the trunk as a bridge over the stream. Maybe someone had needed a bridge. But no. You could cross the creek almost anywhere.

The treehouse itself was part of the wreckage on the other bank. At some point last year he had removed all of his gear except for the winch.

He crossed the creek on his boulder path, took a look; the winch was now gone. Only the plywood sheets and two-by-fours were left, all now horribly askew, with some of the plywood loose on the ground.

He sat down next to these fragments. They were just sticks. He was never going to have lived in this treehouse again. So it didn’t matter.

Edward Cooper had probably done this, or had it done. Of course it might have been total strangers, looking to scavenge whatever the treehouse might have held, like for instance the winch. Surely this Cooper would have left the winch as part of his revenge, as mockery. But maybe not. He didn’t really know. There seemed to be a pattern—computer, kayak, van. His stuff and his life. It looked like deliberate action.

He didn’t know what to do.

O
NE SATURDAY THE QUIBLERS
got to a project they had been planning for some time, which was the installation of garden beds in the backyard. No more suburban lawn wasting their yard space!

And indeed it was a great pleasure to Charlie to cut big rectangles of turf out of the backyard and wheelbarrow these out to the street for disposal by the composting trucks. He was sick of mowing that yard. There was some old lumber stacked at the back of the garage, and now he and Nick laid lengths of it down in the remaining lawn to serve as borders. Then they transferred many wheelbarrow loads of expensive amended soil from the pile in the driveway where the dump trunk had left it, around the house to the rectangles, dodging Joe at many points along the way. The resulting raised beds were loamy and black and looked highly productive and artificial. The grass in between the beds was going to be difficult to cut, Charlie realized, and he envisioned transitioning entirely to mulch between the beds as the seasons went by, leaving only a decorative border of grass around the beds.

Nick and Anna were now working the soil in, and planting their first vegetables. It was full spring now, middle of May, steamy and green, and so they planted the usual summer vegetables: tomatoes, zucchini, strawberries, peppers, pumpkins, melons, basil, eggplant, cilantro, cucumbers.

Nick stood looking down at a broccoli plant, small and delicate between his feet. “So where will the broccoli come out?” he asked Charlie.

Charlie stared at the plant. It looked like an ornamental. “I don’t know,” he confessed, feeling a little stab of fear. They didn’t know anything.

Nick rolled his eyes. “Well, if we’re lucky they won’t show up at all.”

“Come on now. Broccoli is good for you.”

One of their agreements was that they would plant vegetables that Nick and Joe liked to eat, which was a severe constraint, but one they had agreed to, because it was not exclusive; they were planting for Anna and Charlie too. But for the boys it was mostly down to potatoes, an entire bed of them, and carrots. Joe would eat some other vegetables, but Nick would not, and so he was put in charge of the carrot bed. These were to be planted from seed, and apparently the soil had to be specially amended. Sandy soil was best, and white cloth laid over the soil during the germination was recommended—by Drepung, anyway, who was serving as their consultant on this project.

“Although it shouldn’t be me,” he kept saying, “I don’t know anything about gardening really, it’s all Qang at our place, you should have her over to do things like plant carrot seed. I think that one is tricky. She would do a fire puja and everything.”

Still, he helped them to get it planted and covered, on his hands and knees digging happily, and showing worms to Joe. After the planting it was mostly a matter of watering and weeding. Also removing snails and slugs. Joe carried these carefully to the back of their lot, where they could start life over in the weeds bordering the lawn.

“Don’t overwater,” Charlie advised Nick. “You don’t want to drown things in their beds. You have to be precise in how much you water them. I estimate about say this much, if you want to be accurate.”

“Do you mean accurate or precise?” Anna asked from the new flower bed.

“No quibbling allowed.”

“I’m not quibbling! It’s an important distinction.”

“Hello, what do you mean? Accurate and precise mean the precisely same thing!”

“They do not.”

“What do you mean,” Charlie was giggling at her now, “how so?”

“Accuracy,” she said, “means how close an estimate is to the true value. So if you estimate something is five percent and it turns out to be eight percent, then you weren’t very accurate.”

“This is statistics.”

“Yes, it is. And precision refers to how broad your estimate is. Like, if you estimate something is between five and eight percent, then you aren’t being very precise, but if you say a range is between 4.9 and 5.1 percent, then it’s a more precise estimate.”

“I see,” Charlie said, nodding solemnly.

“Quit it! It’s a very important distinction!”

“Of course it is. I wasn’t laughing at that.”

“At what then?”

“At you!”

“But why?”

“Oh, no reason.”

“It is a real distinction,” Nick pointed out to Charlie.

“Oh of course, of course!”

So this then became one of the recurrent motifs of the Quiblers on patrol, a distinction applicable, once you agreed it existed, to an amazing number of situations. Cell-phone call to fine-tune the grocery list, with one of them in the store and one at home; get some potatoes. How many? Get about half a dozen potatoes. Was that being accurate or precise? Or when someone was remarking that Nick was a very precise person, Charlie quipped, “He’s not precise, he’s accurate.” And so on.

On the way back to the garden-supply store, to get more plants and stakes and other supplies, Charlie said, “I wonder how many cubic feet of compost we need if we want to cover all four of the beds, let’s see, they’re six by twelve, say a foot deep in compost, make it simple….”

“Mom can tell you.”

“No that’s all right, I’m working on it—”

“Two hundred and eighty-eight cubic feet,” Anna said, while driving.

“I told you she would.”

“It isn’t fair,” Charlie said, still looking at his fingers. “She uses all these tricks from when she was in math club.”

“Come on,” Anna said.

Nick was helpless with laughter. “Yeah, right, Dad—she uses all these clever fiendish tricks—like
multiplication,
” and he and Anna laughed all the way to the store.

Unfortunately their new spring quickly became the hottest and driest on record in the Potomac watershed, and soon, it having been a dry winter on the whole, the region had to resort to water rationing. Between that and the mosquitoes, everyone began to reminisce with affection about the long winter, and wonder if it had been such a good idea to restart the Gulf Stream, since cold winters were so much preferable to drought. Crops were dying, the rivers falling low, streams drying out entirely, fish populations dying with them; it was bad. A bit of snow and cold temperatures would have been easy in comparison. You could always throw on more clothes when it got cold, but in this heat!