Sixty Days and Counting (38 page)

After another long day at work, about a week later, Diane asked whether he wanted to get something to eat, and he said of course.

At dinner in a restaurant on Vermont Avenue she talked about work things that were bothering her, especially the tendency for innovation to bog in groups of more than a few people, which she called reversion to the norm. Frank laughed at that, thinking it would be a good joke to share with Edgardo. He ate his dinner and watched her talking. From time to time he nodded, asked questions, made comments.

Phil Chase was too busy with other things to give much time to their issues, and he was having trouble getting legislation and funding through Congress. Access to him was controlled by Roy Anastophoulus and Andrea Blackwell, and while they said he remained interested in climate and science, he was still going to trust Diane and the agencies to do their jobs, while he focused on his, which ranged all across the board; his time was precious. Not easy to get any of it, or even to contact him properly. Get on with it, they seemed to be saying. Diane wasn’t pleased with their priorities. She asked Frank if he would mind asking Charlie to ask Roy to ask Chase about certain things more directly; she laughed as she said this. Frank smiled and nodded. He would talk to Charlie. He thought word could get passed along. Maybe in Washington, D.C., he suggested, six degrees of separation was not the maximum separating any two people, but the minimum. Diane laughed again. Frank watched her laugh, and oceans of clouds filled him.

A
NNA QUIBLER HAD BEEN RESEARCHING
the situation in China, and she found it troubling. Their State Environmental Protection Administration had Environmental Protection Bureaus, and environmental laws were on the books. There were even some nongovernmental organizations working to keep the crowded country’s landscape clean. But the government in Beijing had given power for economic development to local governments, and these were evaluated by Beijing for their economic growth only, so laws were ignored and there was nobody who had a good handle on the total situation. It sounded a little familiar, but in China things were amplified and accelerated. Now an NGO called Han Hai Sha (Boundless Ocean of Sand) was sending reports to the division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that coordinated or at least collated the information for all the Chinese environmental studies that were being done. For a country of that size, there weren’t very many of them. In theory the Academy division was an advisory body, but the Communist Party political command made all the decisions, so the environmental scientists made their reports and had included advice, but as far as Anna’s contacts could tell, few major decisions resulting from their advice had ever been made.

Facilitating rapid economic growth had been the ruling principle in Beijing for three decades now, and with a billion people on about as much land as Brazil or the United States, unleashing this engine of human activity had left little room for considerations of landscape. The list of environmental problems the Chinese scientists had gathered was large, but Anna’s contact, a Professor Fengzhen Bao, was now writing to her from an e-mail account in Australia, and he was saying that the big areas in the west that had been militarized were going unstudied and unreported. Except for evidence from the windstorms of loess that blew east, they had little to analyze and were not sure what was happening out there. They knew the government had agreed to fill the Tarim Basin, the major dry playa in the Takla Makan, with sea water pumped up from the China Sea, but that was not their worry; indeed some thought it might even help, by covering some of the toxic dustbeds being torn open by the hot strong winds now sweeping the drought-stricken country so frequently. It was the impact of all the other economic activity that was the danger, including strip-mining, coal power generation, deforestation, urbanization of river valleys, cement production and steel manufacturing, and use of dangerous pesticides banned elsewhere. All these factors were combining downstream, in the eastern half of the country, impacting the big river valleys and the coasts, and the many megacities that were covering what farmland they had. Fengzhen said many were seeing signs of a disaster unfolding.

Cumulative impacts, Anna thought with a sigh. That was one of the most complex and vexing subjects in her own world of biostatistics. And the Chinese problem was an exercise in macrobiostatistics. What Anna’s correspondent Fengzhen talked about in his e-mails was what he called a “general system crash,” and he spoke of indicator species already extinct, and other signs that such a crash might be in its early stages. It was a theory he was working on. He compared the Chinese river valleys’ situation to that of the coral reefs, which had all died in about five years.

Anna read this and swallowed hard. She wrote back asking if he and his colleagues could identify the worst two or three impacts they were seeing, their causes and possible mitigations, and clicked
send
with a sinking feeling. NSF had an international component wherein U.S. scientists teamed with foreign scientists on shared projects, and the infrastructure obtained for these grants remained for the use of the foreign teams when the grants were over. A good idea; but it didn’t look like it was going to be adequate for dealing with this one.

Early one Saturday morning, Charlie met Frank and Drepung on the Potomac, at the little dock by the boathouse at the mouth of Rock Creek, and they put their kayaks in the water just after dawn, the sun like an orange floating on the water. They stroked upstream on the Maryland side, looking into the trees to see if there were any animals still out. Then across the copper sheen to the Virginia side, to check out a strange concrete outfall there. “That’s where I used to bring Rudra Cakrin,” Frank said, pointing at the little overlook at Windy Run.

Then he stroked ahead, smooth and splashless. He was not much more talkative here than he had been in the Sierras, mostly looking around, paddling silently ahead.

On this morning, his habits suited Charlie’s purposes. Charlie slowed in Frank’s wake, and soon he and Drepung were a good distance behind, and working a little to keep up.

“Drepung?”

“Yes, Charlie?”

“I wanted to ask you something about Joe.”

“Yes?”

“Well…I’m wondering how you would characterize what’s going on in him now, after the…ceremony that you and Rudra conducted last year.”

Drepung’s brow furrowed over his sunglasses. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Well—some I don’t know, some sort of spirit was expelled?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Well,” Charlie said. He took a deep breath. “I want it to come back.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want my Joe back. I want whoever he was before the ceremony to come back. That’s the real Joe. I’ve come to realize that. I was wrong to ask you to do anything to him. Whatever he was before, that was him. You know?”

“I’m not sure. Are you saying that he’s changed?”

“Yes! Of course that’s what I’m saying! Because he has changed! And I didn’t realize…I didn’t know that it took all of him, even the parts that—that I don’t know, to make him what he is. I was being selfish, I guess, just because he was so much work. I rationalized that it wasn’t him and that it was making him unhappy, but it
was
him, and he wasn’t unhappy at all. It’s now that he seems kind of unhappy, actually. Or maybe just not himself. I mean he’s easier than before, but he doesn’t seem to be as interested in things. He doesn’t have the same spark. I mean…what was it that you drove out of him, anyway?”

Drepung stared at him for a few strokes of the paddle. Slowly he said, “People say that certain Bön spirits latch on to a person’s intrinsic nature, and are hard to dislodge with Buddhist ceremonies. The whole history of Buddhism coming to Tibet is one fight after another, trying to drive the Bön spirits out of the land and the people, so that Buddhist precepts and, you know, the nonviolence of Buddhism could take the upper hand. It was hard, and there were many contradictions involved, as usual if you try too hard to fight against violent feelings. That itself can quickly become another violence. Some of the earlier lamas had lots of anger themselves. So the struggle never really ended, I guess you would say.”

“Meaning there are still Bön spirits inhabiting you people?”

“Well, not everyone.”

“But some?”

“Yes, of course. Rudra was often pestered. He could not get rid of one of them. And he had invited them into him so many times, when serving as the oracle, it made him susceptible, you might say. Anyway this one would not leave him. This was one of the reasons he was so irritable in his old age.”

“I never thought he was that bad.” Charlie sighed. “So where is that Bön spirit now, eh? Is Rudra’s soul still having to deal with it in the bardo?”

“Possibly so. We cannot tell from here.”

“He’ll get reborn at some point, presumably.”

“At some point.”

“But so…Are there ceremonies to call spirits into you?”

“Sure. That’s what the oracle does, every time there is a visitation ceremony.”

“Ah ha. So listen, could you then
call back
the spirit that you exorcised from Joe? Could you explain it was a mistake, and invite him back?”

Drepung paddled on for a while. The silence lingered. Ahead of them Frank was now drifting into the shallows behind a snag.

“Drepung?”

“Yes, Charlie. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Drepung! Don’t give me that one!”

“No, I mean it. In this case, I think I know what you mean. And I have the right figure in mind. The one that was in Joe. A very energetic spirit.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“And I know the right ceremony too.”

“Oh good. Good. Well—let me know what I can do, then?”

“I will. I’ll have to talk to Sucandra about it, but he will help us. I will tell you when we have made the arrangements, and divined the right time for it.”

“The right time for what?” Frank asked, as they had caught up to him, or at least were within earshot. On the water that was often hard to determine.

“The right time to put Joe Quibler in touch with his spirit.”

“Ah ha! It’s always the right time for that, right?”

“To everything its proper moment.”

“Sure. Look—there’s one of the tapirs from the zoo, see there in that bush?”

“No?”

“There, it’s the same color as the leaves. An animal from South America. But I guess dead leaves are the same color everywhere. Anyway, it’s good to see, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. So how are the feral animals doing generally?”

“Okay. It all depends their natural range. Some species have been spotted seven hundred miles from the zoo, and up to thirty latitude lines out of their natural range. You must have heard Anna talking to Nick about this. She’s helping him and his group to make a habitat corridor map, networking all the remaining wildernesses together. It’s a GIS land-use thing.”

“So if we want it, we can have the animals back.”

“Yeah. We can. It would be cool if the president would back the forest and wilderness initiatives coming out of the animal rights community. Brother to Wolves kind of thing, you know.”

Charlie laughed. “He’s got a lot on his plate. I don’t know if he’s got time for that one right now. It’s a hard thing to get his attention these days.”

For Frank this was a new issue, but Charlie had been dealing with it for years, since long before Phil had become president. It simply was not easy to get any time with someone so powerful and busy. Now Charlie could see that Frank also was running into that limitation. Even though Diane was the presidential science advisor, ensconced in the Old Executive Offices and therefore able to walk over whenever called on to discuss things with the president and his people, she still did not see him very often. He was booked by the minute. No matter how sympathetic Andrea and Roy were to the scientists’ cause, there was very little presidential time available to give to meetings with them. On they had to go, flying in formation, and the days ripped away as in the calendar shots of old movies.

But then one afternoon, after Frank had given Charlie a call to beg for some intercession on the nuclear regulations issue, and Charlie had passed the word along in a call to Roy, he got a call back from that so-busy man.

It was right before dinner time. “The boss is ready to call it a day, but he wants to talk to your people about this regulation relief. So he’s proposed one of his little expeditions over to the Tidal Basin. We take some takeout to the blue pedal boats, and have a picnic on the water.”

“Oh good,” Charlie said. “I’ll call Frank and we’ll meet you down there.”

“Not me, I’ve got stuff to do. Andrea will be going though.”

Charlie called Frank and described the plan.

“Good idea,” Frank said.

The president would be driven over by his Secret Service detail, and as normal hours of operation for the tourist concession there were done for the day, it would be easy to take over the dock and the tidal pool, and unobtrusively to secure the perimeter. The National Park Service was fine with it; indeed, it was already a little presidential tradition, and from their perspective, being political support from the highest position in government, a good thing. Even the most virulent anti-Chase media had not been able to make much hay out of these expeditions—not that they hadn’t tried, but Phil’s laughing ripostes had made them look like prigs and fools, and they had mostly given up on that front.

The time being what it was, Charlie decided to take Joe along. He went down to daycare and found him occupied in some game or other with a girl his age, but he was happy enough to join the Secret Service detail in one of their lightly armored black Priuses.

After they parked on 15th Street and got out and walked down to the pedal-boat dock, where Phil and Andrea and some of the Secret Service guys were already standing, Charlie followed Joe a short way up the basin’s shore path, agreeing that some rocks to throw in the water would be just the thing. Then Joe found some pea gravel and discovered that throwing it in the water by the handful was just as good as throwing bigger rocks.