Sixty Days and Counting (6 page)

Phil was cracking up. “See? That’s why we need you down here!”

Charlie sucked down some air. “Oh. Ha ha. Very funny. Don’t be scaring me like that, Phil.”

“I was serious, Charlie. You’d be fine heading the EPA. We need someone there with a global vision of the world’s environmental problems. And we’ll find someone like that. But that wouldn’t be the best use for you, I agree.”

“Good.” Charlie felt as if a bullet had just whizzed by his head. He was quivering as he said, very firmly, “Let’s just keep things like they are with me.”

“No, that’s not what I mean, either. Listen, can you come down here and at least talk it over with me? Fit that into your schedule?”

Well, shit. How could he say no? This was his boss, also the president of the United States, speaking. But if he had to talk to him in person about it…. Hesighed. “Yeah, yeah, of course. Your wish is my demand.”

“Bring Joe, if you can, I’d enjoy seeing him. We can take him out for a spin on the Tidal Basin.”

“Yeah yeah.”

What else could he say?

The problem was that
yeah yeah
was pretty much the only thing you could say, when replying to the president of the United States making a polite request of you. Perhaps there had been some presidents who had established a limit there, by asking for impossible things and then seeing what happened; power could quickly bring out the latent sadism in the powerful; but if a sane and clever president wanted only ever to get yeses in response to his questions, he could certainly frame them to make it that way. That was just the way it was.

Certainly it was hard to say no to a president-elect inviting you and your toddler to paddle around the Tidal Basin in one of the shiny blue pedal boats docked on the east side of the pond.

And once on the water, it indeed proved very hard to say no to Phil. Joe was wedged between them, life-jacketed and strapped down by Secret Service agents in ways that even Anna would have accepted as safe. He was looking about blissfully; he had even been fully compliant and agreeable about getting into the life jacket and being tied down by the seat belting. It had made Charlie a bit seasick to watch. Now it felt like Phil was doing most of the pumping on the boat’s foot pedals. He was also steering.

Phil was always in a good mood on the water, rapping away about nothing, looking down at Joe, then over the water at the Jefferson Memorial, the most graceful but least emotional of the city’s memorials; beaming at the day, sublimely unaware of the people on the shore path who had noticed him and were exclaiming into their cell phones or taking pictures with them. The Secret Service people had taken roost on the paddleboat dock, and there were an unusual number of men in suits walking the shore among the tourists and joggers.

“Where I need you in the room,” Phil said out of the blue, “is when we gather a global-warming task force. I’ll be out of my depth in that crowd, and there’ll be all kinds of information and plans put forth. That’s where I’ll want your impressions, both real-time and afterward, to help me cross-check what I think. It won’t do to have me describe these things to you after the fact. There isn’t time for that, and besides I might miss the most important thing.”

“Yeah, well—”

“None of that! This task force will be as close to a Department of Science or a Department for the Environment as I can make. It’s going to set the agenda for a lot of what we do. It’ll be my strategy group, Charlie, and I’m saying I need you in it. Now, I’ve looked into the daycare facilities for children at the White House. They’re adequate, and we can get to work making them even better. Joe will be my target audience. You’d like to play all day with a bunch of kids, wouldn’t you Joe?”

“Yeah Phil,” Joe said, happy to be included in the conversation.

“We’ll set up whatever system works best for you, what do you think of that?”

“I like that,” Joe said.

Charlie started to mutter something about the Chinese women who buried their infants up to the neck in riverbank mud every day to leave them to go to work in the rice paddies, but Phil overrode him.

“Gymboree in the basement, if that’s what it takes! Laser tag, paintball wars—you name it! You’d like paintball wars, wouldn’t you Joe?”

“Big truck,” Joe observed, pointing at the traffic on Independence Avenue.

“Sure, we could have big trucks too. We could have a monster truck pull right on the White House lawn.”

“Monster
truck
.” Joe smiled at the phrase.

Charlie sighed. It really seemed to him that Joe should be shouting
big trucks right now,
or trying to escape and crawling around among the turning pedals underfoot, or leaping overboard to go for a swim. Instead he was listening peacefully to Phil’s banter, with an expression that said he understood just as much as he wanted to, and approved of it in full.

Ah well. Everyone changed. And in fact, that had been the whole point of the ceremony Charlie had asked the Khembalis to conduct! Charlie had requested it—had insisted on it, in fact! But without, he now realized, fully imagining the consequences.

Phil said, “So you’ll do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You more or less have to, right? I mean, you’re the one who first suggested that I run, when we were over at Lincoln.”

“Everyone was telling you that.”

“No they weren’t. Besides, you were first.”

“No, you were. I just thought it would work.”

“And you were right, right?”

“Apparently so.”

“So you owe me. You got me into this mess.”

Phil smiled, waved at some tourists as he made a broad champing turn back toward the other side of the Basin. Charlie sighed. If he agreed, he would not see Joe anywhere near as much as he was used to—an idea he hated. On the other hand, if he didn’t see him as much, he wouldn’t notice so often how much Joe had changed. And he hated that change.

So much to dislike! Unhappily he said, “I’ll have to talk to Anna about it first. But I think she’ll go for it. She’s pretty pro-work. So. Shit. I’ll give it a try. I’ll give it a few months, and see how it goes. By that time your task force should be on their way, and I can see where things stand and go emeritus if I need to.”

“Good.” And Phil pedaled furiously, almost throwing Charlie’s knees up into his chin with the force of his enthusiasm. He said, “Look, Joe, all the people are waving at you!”

Joe waved back. “Hi people!” he shouted. “Big truck, right there! Look! I like that big truck. That’s a good truck.”

And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of the fundamental mysteries.

Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming. This was, he thought, an indicator of how happy he had been with the way things were, the situation as he had had it. Mister Mom—he had loved it. Just this last May he had been walking down Leland Street and had passed Djina, one of the Gymboree moms he knew, biking the other way, and he had called out to her “Happy Mother’s Day!” and she had called back, “Same to you!” and he had felt a glow in him that had lasted an hour. Someone had understood.

Of course the pure-mom routine of the 1950s was an Ozzie and Harriet nightmare, a crazy-making program so effective that the surprise was there were any moms at all in that generation who had stayed sane. Most of them had gone nuts in one way or another, because in its purest form that life was too constrained to the crucial but mindless daily chores of child-rearing and house maintenance—“uncompensated labor,” as the economists put it, but in a larger sense than what they meant with their idiot bean-counting. Coming in the fifties, hard on the heels of World War II’s shattering of all norms, its huge chaotic space of dislocation and freedom for young women, it must have felt like a return to prison after a big long breakout.

But that wasn’t the life Charlie had been leading. Along with the child care and the shopping and the housework had been his “real” work as a senatorial aide, which, even though it had been no more than a few phone conversations a day, had bolstered the “unreal” work of Mr. Momhood in a curious dual action. Eventually which work was “real” had become a moot point; the upshot was that he felt fulfilled, and the lucky and accidental recipient of a full life. Maybe even overfull! But that was what happened when Freud’s short list of the important things in life—work and love—were all in play.

He had had it all. And so change be damned! Charlie wanted to live on in this life forever. Or if not forever, then as long as the stars. And he feared change, as being the probable degradation of a situation that couldn’t be bettered.

But here it was anyway, and there was no avoiding it. All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived. This was what the Khembalis were always saying; it was one of the Buddhist basics. And now Charlie had to try to believe it.

So, the day came when he got up, and Anna left for work, then Nick for school; then it was Joe and Da’s time, the whole day spread before them like a big green park. But on this day, Charlie prepped them both to leave, while talking up the change in the routine. “Big day, Joe! We’re off to school and work, to the White House! They have a great daycare center there, it’ll be like Gymboree!”

Joe looked up. “Gymboree?”

“Yes,
like
Gymboree, but not it exactly.” Charlie’s mood plummeted as he considered the differences—not one hour but five, or six, or eight, or twelve—and not parents and children together, but the child alone in a crowd of strangers. And he had never even liked Gymboree!

More and more depressed, he strapped Joe into his stroller and pushed him down to the Metro. The tunnel walls were still discolored or even wet in places, and Joe checked everything out as on any other trip. This was one of their routines.

Phil himself was not installed in the White House yet, but the arrangements had been made for Joe to join the daycare there, after which Charlie would leave and walk over to the senate offices in the old Joiner’s Union building. Up and out of the Metro, into warm air, under low windy clouds. People scudded underneath them, hurrying from one shelter to the next before rain hit.

Charlie had gotten out at Smithsonian, and the Mall was almost empty, only a few runners in sight. He pushed Joe along faster and faster, feeling more and more desolate—unreasonably so, almost to the point of despair—especially as Joe continued to babble on happily, energized by the Mall and the brewing storm, no doubt expecting something like their usual picnic and play session. Hours that no matter how tedious they had seemed at the time were now revealed as precious islands in eternity, as paradises lost. And it was impossible to convey to Joe that today was going to be different. “Joe, I’m going to
drop you off
at the daycare center here at the White House. You’re going to get to play with the other kids and the teachers and you have to do what the teachers say for a
long time
.”

“Cool Dad. Play!”

“Yeah that’s right. Maybe you’ll love it.”

It was at least possible. Vivid in Charlie’s mind was Anna’s story about taking Nick to daycare for the first time, and seeing Nick’s expression of stoic resignation, which had pierced her so; Charlie had seen the look himself, taking Nick in those first few times. But Joe was no stoic, and would never resign himself to anything. Charlie was anticipating something more like chaos and disorder, perhaps even mayhem, Joe moving from protest to tirade to rampage. But who knew? The way Joe was acting these days, anything was possible. He might love it. He could be gregarious, and he liked crowds and parties. It was really more a matter of liking them too much, taking them too far.

In any case, in they went. Security check, and then inside and down the hall to the daycare center, a well-appointed and very clean place. Lots of little kids running around among toys and play structures, train sets and bookshelves and Legos and all. Joe’s eyes grew round. “Hey Dad! Big Gymboree!”

“That’s right, like Gymboree. Except I’m going to go, Joe. I’m going to go and leave you here.”

“Bye Dad!” And off he ran without a backward glance.

P
hil Chase was a man with a past. He was one of Congress’s Vietnam vets, and that was by and large a pretty rambunctious crowd. They had license to be a little crazy, and not all of them took it, but it was there if they wanted it.

Phil had wanted it. He had always played that card to the hilt. Unconventional, unpredictable, devil-may-care, friend of McCain. And for well over a decade, his particular shtick had been to be the World’s Senator, phoning in his work or jetting into D.C. at the last hour to make votes he had to make in person. All this had been laid before the people of California as an explicit policy, with the invitation to vote him out of office if they did not like it. But they did. Like a lot of California politicians who had jumped onto the national stage, his support at home was strong. High negatives, sure, but high positives, with the positives outrunning the negatives by about two to one. Now that he was president, the numbers had only polarized more, in the usual way of American politics, everyone hooked on the soap opera of cheering for or against personalities.

So a checkered past was a huge advantage in creating the spectacle. In his particular version of the clichéd list, Phil had been a reporter for the L.A.
Times,
a surfboard wax manufacturer (which business had bankrolled the start of his political career), a VA social worker, a college lecturer in history, a sandal maker, and an apprentice to a stonemason. From that job he had run for Congress from Marin County, and won the seat as an outsider Democrat. This was a difficult thing to do. The Democratic Party hated outsiders to join the party and win high office at the first try; they wanted everyone to start at the bottom of the ladder and work their way up until thoroughly brainwashed and obliged.

Worse yet, Phil had then jumped into a weak Senatorial race, and ridden the state’s solid Democratic majority into the Senate, even though the party was still offended and not behind him.

Soon after that, his wife of twenty-three years, his high-school sweetheart, who had served in Vietnam as a nurse to be closer to him after
he was drafted, died in a car crash. It was after that that Phil had started his globe-trotting, turning into the World’s Senator. Because he kept his distance from D.C. through all those years, no one in the capital knew much about his personal life. What they knew was what he gave them. From his account it was all travel, golf, and meetings with foreign politicians, often the environmental ministers, often in central Asia. “I like the Stans,” he would say.

In his frequent returns to California, he was much the same. For a while he pursued his “Ongoing Work Education program,” Project OWE, because he
owed
it to his constituents to learn what their lives were like. Pronounced
ow,
however, by his staff, because of the injuries he incurred while taking on various jobs around the state for a month or three, working at them while continuing to function as senator in D.C., which irritated his colleagues no end. In that phase, he had worked as a grocery store bagger and checkout clerk, construction worker, real estate agent, plumber (or plumber’s helper as he joked), barrio textile seamstress, sewage maintenance worker, trash collector, stockbroker, and a celebrated stint as a panhandler in San Francisco, during which time he had slept at undisclosed locations in Golden Gate Park and elsewhere around the city, and asked for spare change for his political fund—part of his “spare change” effort in which he had also asked California citizens to send in all the coins accumulating on their dressers, a startlingly successful plan that had weighed tons and netted him close to a million dollars, entirely funding his second run for senator, which he did on the cheap and mostly over the internet.

He had also walked from San Francisco to Los Angeles, climbed the Seven Summits (voting on the clean air bill from the top of Mt. Everest), swum from Catalina to the southern California mainland, and across Chesapeake Bay, and hiked the Appalachian trail from end to end. (“Very boring,” was his judgment. “Next time the PCT.”)

All these activities were extraneous to his work in the Senate, and time-consuming, and for his first two terms he was considered within the Beltway to be a celebrity freak, a party trick of a politician and a lightweight in the real world of power (i.e. money) no matter how far he could walk or swim. But even in that period his legislation had been interesting in concept (his contribution) and solidly written (his staff’s contribution), and cleverly pursued and promoted by all, with much more of it being enacted into law
than was usual in the Senate. This was not noted by the press, always on the lookout for bad news and ephemera, but by his third term it began to become evident to insiders that he had been playing the insider game all along, and only pretending to be an outsider, so that his committee appointments were strong, and his alliances within the Democratic Party apparatus finally strong, and across the aisle with moderate Republicans and McCain and other Vietnam vets, even stronger. He also had done a good job making his enemies, taking on flamboyantly bad senators like Winston and Reynolds and Hoof-in-mouth, whose subsequent falls from grace on corruption charges or simply failed policies had then retroactively confirmed his early judgments that these people were not just political dunderheads but also dangerous to the republic.

So ultimately, when the time came, everything he had done for twenty years and more turned out to have been as it were
designed
to prepare him not only for his successful run for the presidency, but for his subsequent occupancy as well, a crucial point and something that many previous candidates obviously forgot. The world travel, the global network of allies and friends, the OWE program, the legislation he had introduced and gotten passed, his committee work—it all fit a pattern, as if he had had the plan from the start.

Which he totally denied, and his staff believed him. They thought in their gossip among themselves that they had seen him come to his decision to run just a year before the campaign (at about the same time, Charlie thought but never said aloud, that he had met for twenty minutes with the Khembali leaders). Whether he had harbored thoughts all along, no one really knew. No one could read his mind, and he had no close associates. Widowed; kids grown; friends kept private and out of town: to Washington he seemed as lonely and impenetrable as Reagan, or FDR, or Lincoln—all friendly and charming people, but distant in some basic way.

In any case he was in, and ready and willing to use the office as strong presidents do—not only as the executive branch of government, whipping on the other two to get things done, but also as a bully pulpit from which to address the citizens of the country and the rest of the world. His high positive/high negative pattern continued and intensified, with the debate over him in the States more polarized than ever, at least in the media. But in the world at large, his positives were higher than any American president’s
since Kennedy. And interest was very high. All waited and watched through the few weeks left until his inauguration; there was a sudden feeling of stillness in the world, as if the pendulum swinging them all together helplessly this way and that had reached a height, and paused in space, just before falling the other way. People began to think that something might really happen.

I
T SEEMED TO FRANK
that with such a president as Phil Chase coming into office, in theory it ought to be very interesting to be the Presidential Science Advisor, or an advisor to the advisor. But there were aspects of the new job that were disturbing as well. It was going to mean increasing the distance between himself and the doing of science proper, and was therefore going to move him away from what he was good at. But that was what it meant to be moving into administration. Was there anyone who did policy well?

His intrusion on the Khembalis was another problem. Rudra’s failing health was a problem. His own injury, and the uncertain mentation that had resulted (if it had), was a very central problem—perhaps
the
problem. Leaving NSF, meaning Anna and the rest of his acquaintances and routines there (except for Edgardo and Kenzo, who were also joining Diane’s team), was a problem.

Problems required solutions, and solutions required decisions. And he couldn’t decide. So the days were proving difficult.

Because above and beyond all the rest of his problems, there was the absolutely immediate one: he had to—
had to
—warn Caroline that her cover was insufficient to keep even a newcomer on the scene like Edgardo’s friend from locating her. He had to warn her of this! But he did not know where she was. She might be on that island in Maine, but unless he went and looked he couldn’t know. But if he went, he could not do anything that might expose her (and him too) to her husband. His van was chipped with a GPS transponder—Caroline was the one who had told him about it—so its identity and location could be under surveillance, and tracked wherever it went. He could easily imagine a program that would flag any time his van left the metropolitan area. This was a serious disadvantage, because his van was his shelter of last resort, his only mobile bedroom, and all in all, the most versatile room in the disassembled and modular home that he had cast through the fabric of the city.

“Can I dechip my van?” he asked Edgardo next day on their run, after wanding them both again. “For certain? And, you know, as if by accident or malfunction?”

“I should think so,” Edgardo replied. “It might be something you would need some help with. Let me look into it.”

“Okay, but I want to go soon.”

“Up to Maine?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll do my best. The person I want to talk to is not exactly on call. I have to meet them in a context like this one.”

But that night, as Frank was settling down in the garden shed with Rudra, who was already asleep, Qang came out to tell him there was a man there to see him. This caused Frank’s pulse to elevate to a disturbing degree—

But it was Edgardo, and a short man, who said “hello” and after that spoke only to Edgardo, in Spanish. “Umberto here is another porteño,” Edgardo said. “He helps me with matters such as this.”

Umberto rolled his eyes dramatically. He took Frank’s keys and went at the van as if he owned it, banging around, pulling up carpet from the floor, running various diagnostics through a laptop, complaining to Edgardo all the while. Eventually he opened the hood and after rooting around for a while, unbolted a small box from the crowded left engine wall. When he was done he gave the box to Frank and walked off into the dark, still berating Edgardo over his shoulder.

“Thanks!” Frank called after him. Then to Edgardo: “Did I see how he did that, so I can put it back in?” He peered at the engine wall, then the bolts in his hand there with the box, then the holes the bolts had come out of. It looked like a wrench kit would do it. “Okay, but where do I put it now?”

“You must leave it right here where it would be, so that it seems your van is parked here. Then replace it when you return.”

“Out here on the street?”

“Isn’t there a driveway to this house?”

“Yeah, I can leave it there I guess. Buried in this gravel here.”

“There you go.”

“And other than that, I’m clean?”

“That’s what Umberto said. Speaking only of the van, of course.”

“Yeah. I’ve got the wand for my stuff. But is that enough? The van won’t look weird to toll gates for not having the box, or anything like that?”

“No. Not every vehicle has these things yet. So far, the total information society is not yet fully online. When it is, you won’t be able to do stuff like this. You’ll never be able to get off the grid, and if you did it would look so strange it would be worse than being on the grid. Everything will have to be rethought.”