Sixty Days and Counting (30 page)

“Of course I do!” she snapped. “But I can’t, okay? I’ve got stuff I’ve got to do around here.”

“What? Maybe I can help.”

“You can’t help! Especially not if you stay exposed in your job and all!”

“But I have to do that.”

“Well. There you are then.”

He nodded, hesitantly. He didn’t understand, and wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Shall we go back out there and pick a spot?”

“No. There’s a pair of roots there with a hole between them. I felt it under me, it was under my head. You can put something in that gap, and I’ll find it. I need to get going.” She checked her watch, looked around, stood abruptly; her metal chair screeched over the concrete.

“Caroline—”

“Be careful,”
she said, leaning down to stare him right in the face. She brought her hand up between their faces to point a finger at his nose, and he saw it was quivering. “I mean it. You’re going to have to be really careful. I can see why you want to keep going to work, but this is no game we’re caught in.”

“I know that! But we’re stuck with it. Don’t be mad at me.
Please.
There’s just things we both still have to do.”

“I know.” Her mouth was still a tight line, but now at least she was looking him in the eye. “Okay. Let’s do the dead drop, every week. I’ll check on Saturdays, you check Wednesdays.”

“Okay. I’ll leave something there for this Saturday, and you get it and leave something for Wednesday.”

“Okay. But if I can’t, check the next week. But I’ll try.” And with a peck to the top of his head she was off into the dark of Georgetown.

Frank sat there, feeling stunned. A little drunk. He didn’t know what to think. He was confused, and for a moment overwhelmed, feeling the indecision fall hard on him. When you feel love, elation, worry, fear, and puzzlement, all at once, and all at equally full volume, they seem to cancel each other out, creating a vacuum, or rather a plenum. He felt Carolined.

“Fuck,” he said half-aloud. It had been that way from the moment they met, actually; only now it was intensified, fully present in his mind, still felt in his body. Abruptly he finished his drink and took off into the dark. Over the creek’s footbridge, back to the spot where they had kissed.

One of the trees on the river side of their impromptu layby had the two big roots she had referred to, growing out in a fork and then plunging down into the rich loamy earth and reuniting, leaving a leaf-filled pocket. He tore one of the clear plastic credit card holders out of his wallet, took a receipt from his pocket and wrote on the back:

I LOVE YOU I’LL LOOK EVERY WEDNESDAY WRITE ME

Then he put it in the sleeve and buried it under leaves shoved into the hole. Topped it all with leaves and hoped she would find it, hoped she would use it and write him. It seemed like she would. They had kissed so passionately, right here on this very spot, no more than an hour or so before. Why now this edge of discord between them?

Well, that seemed pretty clear: her desire for him to disappear with her. Obviously she felt it was important, and that he might even be in danger if he didn’t join her. But he couldn’t join her.

That feeling was in itself interesting, now that he thought of it. Was that a sign of decisiveness, or just being balky? Had he had any choice? Maybe one would never go into hiding unless there were no other choice. This was probably one cause of Caroline’s irritation; she had to hide, while he didn’t. Although maybe he did and just didn’t know it.

Big sigh. He didn’t know. For a second he lost his train of thought and didn’t know anything. What had just happened? He looked down on the bed of leaves they had lain on. Caroline! he cried in his mind, and groaned aloud.

H
E WAS SITTING WITH RUDRA
at the little table under their window, both of them looking at laptops and tapping away, the room itself slightly swaying on a wind from the west. After the heat of the day, the cool fragrance coming off the river was a balm. Moonlight broke and squiggled whitely on the black sweep of the water. Frank was reading Thoreau and at one point he laughed and read aloud to Rudra:

“We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains on the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for three score years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them.”

Rudra nodded. “Henry likes the same things you do,” he observed.

“It’s true.”

“A treehouse is a good idea,” Rudra said, looking out the windows at the dark river.

“It is, isn’t it?”

Frank read on for a while, then: “Here, listen to this, he might as well be at the table with us:

“I live so much in my habitual thoughts that I forget there is any outside to the globe, and am surprised when I behold it as now—yonder hills and river in the moonlight, the monsters. Yet it is salutary to deal with the surface of things. What are these rivers and hills, these hieroglyphics which my eyes behold? There is something invigorating in this air, which I am peculiarly sensible is a real wind, blowing from over the surface of a planet. I look out at my eyes, I come to my window, and I feel and breathe the fresh air. It is a fact equally glorious with the most inward experience. Why have we ever slandered the outward?”

“What say, speak bad?” Rudra asked. “About this?” He waved at their view. “Maybe that is your third good correlation. The outer and the inner.”

“I want something more specific.”

“Maybe he means we should stop reading, and look at the river.”

“Ah yes. True.”

And they did.

But the next night, when Frank drove into the farm’s parking lot after work, late, and got out of his van and headed for the treehouse, Qang came out of the big farmhouse and hurried over to intercept him.

“Frank, sorry—can you come in here, please?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Rimpoche Rudra Cakrin has died.”

“What?”

“Rudra died this day, after you left.”

“Oh no. Oh no.”

“Yes. I am afraid so.” She held his arm, watched him closely.

“Where is he? I mean—”

“We have his body in the prayer room.”

“Oh no.”

The enormity of it began to hit him. “Oh, no,” he said again helplessly.

“Please,” she said. “Be calm. Rudra must not be disturbed now.”

“What?” So he had misheard—

“This is an important time for his spirit. We here must be quiet, and let him focus on his work in the bardo. What say—help him on his way, by saying the proper prayers.”

Frank felt himself lose his balance a little bit. Gone weak at the knees—yet another physiological reaction shared by all. Shock of bad news, knees went weak. “Oh no,” he said. She was so calm about it. Standing there talking about helping Rudra through the first hours of the afterlife—suddenly he realized he was living with aliens. They didn’t even look human.

He went over and sat down on the front steps of the house. Everything still scrubbed, new paint, Tibetan colors. Qang was saying something, but he didn’t hear it.

After a while, it was Drepung sitting beside him. Briefly he put an arm around Frank’s shoulders and squeezed, then they just sat there side by side. Minutes passed; ten minutes, maybe fifteen.

“He was a friend,” Frank explained. “He was my friend.”

“Yes. He was my teacher.”

“When—when did you meet him?”

“I was ten.”

Drepung explained some of Rudra’s role in Khembalung, some of his personal history. Frank glanced up once and saw that tears had rolled down Drepung’s broad cheeks as he spoke, even though his voice and manner were calm. This was a comfort to Frank.

“Tell me what happens now,” he said when Drepung was silent.

Drepung then explained their funeral customs. “We will say the first prayers for a day and a half. Then later there will be other ceremonies, at the proper intervals. Rudra was an important guru, so there will be quite a few of these. The big one will be after forty days, as with anyone, and then one last one at forty-nine days.”

Eventually they got up and clomped up the central stairs of the treehouse, winding around the trunk of one of the main trees. Then down the catwalk to their room.

Others had already been there. Presumably this was where Rudra had died. The sight of the empty and sheetless bed cast another wave of grief through Frank. He sat down in the chair by the window, looked down at the river flowing by. He thought that if they had not left their garden shed, maybe Rudra would not have died.

Well, that made no sense. But Frank saw immediately that he could not continue to stay there. It would make him too sad. Then again (remembering his conversation with Caroline) moving out would help his evasion of Cooper anyway. He was free to go and do the necessary things.

In the days that followed, Frank moved his stuff out of the Khembali treehouse back into his van, now the last remaining room of his modular house, compromised though it might be. He usually parked it in the farm’s little parking lot, just to be near Drepung and Sucandra and Padma; he found that nearness comforting, and he did not want them to think that he had abandoned them or gone crazy or anything. “You need the room,” he kept saying about the treehouse. “I like it better now to be in my van.” They accepted that and put four people in the room.

As the days passed they went through one or the other of the various stages of Rudra’s passage through the bardo—Frank lost track of the details, but he tried to remember the last funeral’s date, said to be the most important one for those who wished to honor the memory of that particular incarnation.

He was at a loss for what to do when not at work. The Old Executive Offices, though much closer to the centers of national power, were nowhere near as comfortable to spend time in as the NSF building had been. It was not possible to sleep there, for instance, without security noticing and dropping by to check on him. Meanwhile his van was probably still GPSed and would be one of the ways that Edward Cooper was keeping track of him. He needed it for a bedroom and to get out to the Khembalis, and yet he wanted to be able to drop off the grid every day when he left work.

He didn’t know. Show up to work, work, disappear, then show up again the next day. This was important, given the things that were happening.

What would happen if he got Edgardo’s help to take all the transponders out of his van?

But that would alert Cooper that Frank knew the chips were there and had removed them. It was better the way it was, perhaps, so that he could find them and remove them when he really had to, and then travel off-grid. He might need the van if Caroline went back to Mount Desert Island and he wanted to drive up to see her. In general it was an advantage. That was what Edgardo had meant.

He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t figure it out, and he had no place to stay. What to do, how to live. Always a question, but never more so than now. He could do this, he could do that. Anyone could; no one had to.

Do the duty of the day. (Emerson.)

The easiest thing was to work as long as possible. It was a kind of default mode, and he needed that now. The fewer decisions the better. He needed a job that filled all the waking hours of the day, and he had that. But now Optimodal was not optimum, and he didn’t really want to go to the farm, and his treehouse was gone. His home had washed away in the flood of events. All he had left was his van, and his van was chipped.

Out of habit he went back out to Site 21. Summer was fully upon them, and all the leaves were green. But the site was empty these days, and Sleepy Hollow had been dismantled.

He sat there at the picnic table wondering what to do.

Spencer and Robin and Robert came charging in, and Frank leaped up to join them. “Thank God,” he said, hugging each in turn; they always did that, but this time it mattered.

They ran the course in an ecstasy, as usual, but for Frank there was an extra element, of release and forgetfulness. Just to run, just to throw, life crashing through the greenery everywhere around them. They ran in a swirl of becoming. Everyone died sometime; but it was life that mattered.

Afterward Frank sat down with Spencer near the chuckling creek, brown and foamy. “I’m wondering if I could join your fregans,” he said.

“Well, sure,” Spencer said, looking surprised. “But I thought you lived with the Khembalis?”

“Yes. But my friend there died, and I—I need to get away. There are some issues. I’m under a weird kind of surveillance, and I want to get away from that. So, I’m wondering if you would mind, maybe—I don’t know. Introducing me to some people or whatever. Like those times we went to a dinner.”

“Sure,” Spencer said. “That happens every night. No problem at all.”

“Thanks.”

“So you’re doing something classified then?”

“I don’t know.”

Spencer laughed. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Life outdoors is a value in itself. You’ll like it, you’ll see.”

So he went with Spencer, on foot, to the house of choice for that evening—a boarded-up monster, not a residential house but a half-block apartment complex that had been wrecked in the flood and never renovated. There were a lot of these, and the ferals and fregans now had maps and lists, locks and keys and codes and phones. Every few nights they moved to a new place, within a larger community, most of whom were also moving around. Spencer started calling Frank on his FOG phone to let him know where they would be that night, and Frank started leaving work at more or less the normal time, using a wand Edgardo gave him to see that he was clear, then meeting Spencer in the park, running a frisbee round, then walking somewhere in Northwest to the rendezvous of the night. Once or twice Frank joined the dumpster-diving teams, and was interested to learn that most restaurant dumpsters were now locked shut. But this was to satisfy insurance-company liability concerns more than to keep people from the food, because for every dumpster they visited they had either the key or the combination, provided by kitchen workers who were either sympathetic or living the life themselves. And so they would go into the parking lots and workspaces behind the city’s finest, and set a lookout, and then unlock the dumpster and remove the useful food, which often was set carefully in one corner by the kitchen help, but in any case was obvious.