Fifty Degrees Below (23 page)

Sometimes he couldn’t stand that, and he scanned submissions to
The Journal of Sociobiology
instead. Maternal sentiment not innate, one paper said; this asserted because women in northern Taiwan, also European women in the medieval and early modern period, gave away their own children on a regular basis, for economic reasons. Maternal sentiment therefore perhaps a learned response. Frank had his doubts, and besides all these conclusions were long since outlined in Hrdy, a source the paper’s authors seemed unaware of. That ignorance and the huge generalizations given the evidence probably would doom this paper to rejection.

Abstract, conclusion; abstract, conclusion. Female brown capuchin monkeys throw things if they see other monkeys getting more than they got from an equivalent exchange. Aversion to inequity therefore probably very deep-rooted, evolutionarily. Sense of fairness evolved. Thus cooperative groups, long before hominids. Monkey ethics; interesting.

First primate found and identified, in China, 55 million years old. Named
Teilhardina,
very nice. One ounce; fit in the palm of your hand. Amazing.

Groups of female baboons could coerce new male members of the troop into more peaceful behaviors. Females of the Japanese quail
Coturnix japonica
tended to choose the losers in male-male confrontations. Maybe that’s why Caroline likes me, Frank thought, then grimaced at this traitorous self-judgment. It was postulated that for the female quail, choosing the loser reduced the risk of later injury, the males being rough during sex. Previously-mated females more likely to choose losers than virgins were.

On he read, his face thrust forward into the laptop so eagerly that his nose almost touched the screen. There could not be another person on earth who read these things with more intense interest than he did, for to him these were questions of immediate practice, influencing what he might do later that very day. To him every paper had the unwritten subtitle
How Should I Live Right Now?

When his wristwatch alarm beeped the question always remained unanswered. Time to get up and invent the evening.

Run a round of frisbee, drop in on the bros, play chess with Chessman, visit the Quiblers, sit in Kramer’s or Second Story to read, have an ouzo at Odysseus. For about a month he played chess with Chessman almost every night, becoming a regular mark, as Zeno put it, as Chessman was getting unbeatable. He played more than anyone else, he was a pro, and it might be that he was getting really good; Frank didn’t play well enough to be sure. Paradoxically, the youth’s style had become less aggressive. He waited for people to extend a little, then beat them. The games took more time, and maybe that was the point; it gave people hope, and thus might create more repeat customers.

In between games they sat by a kerosene lantern, nursing coffees or beers. Chessman read paperbacks under the lamp, books with titles like
One Hundred Best End Games
. Once it had been
The Immortal Games of Paul Morphy,
another time
The Genius of Paul Morphy
. Frank chatted with the others. It was another iteration of a conversation they had had many times before, concerning the inadequacies of the National Park Service. All their various conversations were like performances of long-running plays, alternating in repertory style. Laughs in the usual places. The bros laughed more than anyone Frank knew, but it was seldom happy laughter. They were shouting defiance. Vocalizations were as important to people as to gibbons. The daily hoot,
oooooooooop!

So they sat there, telling stories. Awful things from Vietnam, a rare item in their repertory, but sometimes Zeno and Fedpage and Andy got a horrible urge to reminisce. More often they described recent scuffles, re-enacted in full. The bros retained a choreographic memory of every fight they had ever been in. Then also, recent meals; ranger actions of any kind, important or trivial; the weather. Cutter would drop by almost every night, even though he clearly had somewhere else he could go. In that sense he was like Frank, and perhaps as a result he and Frank didn’t talk much. The truth was that Frank spoke to few but Chessman and Zeno. Sometimes he would talk to Fedpage about items from the
Post,
or Andy would command that he join one of Andy’s stock exchanges. Cutter always brought a sixpack or two, and they would fall to and divide the cans and drink until the drink was gone. This usually perked them up.

“Cutter is a tree surgeon,” Zeno clarified to Frank, “our tree surgeon, currently unemployed.”

“Not city parks?” Frank asked Cutter, gesturing at the patch on the shoulder of his shirt.

“Used to be.”

“But you look like you’re still doing it?”

“Oh I am, I am.”

“Cutter is the keeper of the forest. He is the unsung savior of this fucking city.”

“What else am I gonna do.”

“So you cut on your own?”

“Yes I do.”

“He steals gas outta cars to keep his chainsaw going, don’t ya Cutter?”

“Someone’s gotta do it. This town’d disappear like
that
.”

“The forest it
wants
this city back, you know it does!
That’s
who’s winning.”

“—two three years I swear. But city knows some of us’ll keep at it, so they keep cutting staff.”

“They cut more people than trees!”

Cutter laughed. “Yesterday Byron couldn’t buckle his harness but in the last hole, you know he’s so fat these days, and so it gave loose on him as he finished dropping a big branch, and he fell and popped out of the waist belt but his legs held, so he swung down and the chainsaw smacked him right here on top of his leg. So he’s hanging there screaming like a fool, I cut my leg, I cut off my leg oh
God
! But weren’t no cut on his leg, just a bruise and a scrape. So we calling up to him, Byron you okay, ain’t no cut on your leg, quit your wiggling, you gonna slip out your harness and crack your head like a egg. But he was yelling so loud he never heard us, My leg, my leg, I’ve cut off my laaig! I can’t
feel
it no more! And we telling him, Open your eyes fool and look you’re fine, and he won’t do it. I can’t stand to see it! His eyes all squished shut, No no
no,
I can’t
do
it I can’t stand to see it, I can’t stand to
look
it’s too horrible, I can
feel
it’s gone, I can
feel
the blood
dripping
!”

The bros loved this. “I can
feeeel
it!” It was obvious this was something they’d be saying for months to come, a new addition to their clutch of stock phrases.

“How’d you get him down?”

“We had to pinch his eyelids open and
make
him look.”

Bursts of raucous laughter, shouted comments, a mocking re-enactment of how it must have been. Another little climax of hilarity or celebration punctuating the day.

After that they sank slowly into sullen peacefulness or sullen squabbling, same as always. The various aches and complaints. Fedpage went back to his
Post,
the rest to the chessboard or the scraps on the grill topping the flue of the smoky fire. Dry leaves and wet branches and again the meat was both black with smoke and undercooked. Prod the fire to keep it sputtering along. Out into the dark for a round of copious urination. Some slipped off to find another haunt; others slumped in their places, the evening’s entertainment over.

Frank walked out into the night. Sound of the creek, the citysurround. Voices in the distance; there were people at site 20, as always, and also at 18, which was a surprise. As he closed on his tree it got quieter and so did he, making his final approach as quietly as possible, covered by the noise of the creek a short distance below. Under his tree he waited, listening carefully. Night goggles, survey the scene; nothing warm upstream or down. When he was convinced no one was nearby, he called down Miss Piggy and clambered up into the night, up into his aerie, like a mountaineer scaling a last overhang to a ledge camp.

He pulled through the gap in the rail and sat on the plywood. Cranking Miss Piggy up, it occurred to him that the rent he was saving these days might eventually enable him to afford a down payment on a house, when he finally returned to San Diego. A quick calculation indicated that to save enough he would have to stay up here some five or six years.

Well—it could be worse. It was not such a bad prospect, really. Up in the night and the wind, swaying slightly north and south; how bad was that?

He lay down on his bed. In the mellow glow of his battery-powered Coleman lantern, he opened a paperback copy of Italo Calvino’s
The Baron In the Trees
. He had seen the book in Second Story and bought it, thinking it might teach him something. But so far it had been short on logistical detail, and lacking also the explanatory power he was hoping for. The young baron had barged into the trees one day after a fight with his father, which was believable enough, but unilluminating. And his decision to stay up there the rest of his life, without ever coming down at all, was simply unreasonable. Cosimo could have done everything he had done and still come down from time to time. Not coming down made it more of a parable than a program. An allegory, perhaps, for staying in nature no matter what. Well, in that sense Cosimo was a hero, his story a good fable.

But Frank was content to be up here when he was, without wanting more. Around him the aging leaves clattered, and in the distance the cry of a loon, or maybe even a coyote—in any case one of those crazies who would not shut up at night. Like certain of the bros. Every animal trait had its echo in some human quality. “Owwww,” he howled quietly. “Owwwwwww.” The tree rocked him in its slight syncopation against the wind.

He wanted Caroline to call him. He was tired of waiting for her to call, why didn’t she call? Surely she knew he was waiting. Even if she had trouble at home, even if she couldn’t get away, surely she could call? Could she be in trouble? Could her husband (an awful phrase) have her under surveillance? Such tight surveillance that she couldn’t get away to call? Could he have that same kind of surveillance trained on Frank, making it doubly hard for her to call? Was there some reason why she couldn’t get loose like she had before? After all, she had both called and appeared in the Bethesda park. Perhaps it required a stay with her friends. Who were these friends she had stayed with? Whose boat had she been on during the flood? Had she been under surveillance then? Why didn’t she . . . but maybe she couldn’t— but why didn’t she call?

He was getting sleepy. There were so many questions he couldn’t answer, couldn’t ask. So much he didn’t know. There were so many times when he wanted to touch her again. Kiss her. Have his face in her hair. In her absence this specific desire was becoming a general desire, diffusing into the landscape itself. In D.C. that could be quite an experience; the women of Washington were gorgeous. All the exiled goddesses of Earth passed you by on the street. Every woman metamorphosed into the movie star who would have played her on screen; every woman became the avatar of her particular type and yet remained completely herself. Why didn’t she call?

Voices below. Frank hung like a spirit above them. No way people would see him in the dark, even infrared wouldn’t work through the plywood and the branch-camouflaged insulation tacked to its underside; he had tested that to be sure.

The voices were discussing something, it sounded like plans. He surveiled until they moved off and were lost in the sound of the creek.

She didn’t call because of surveillance. Frank had looked into this a little, what this might mean to be under surveillance in this day and age. But he had been using his computer at work to make the search, at first, and that began to seem like it might put out a flag of some kind. He had felt constrained, and started to do his research in the NSF library, a very different resource. Maybe he had already given himself away. Would they become suspicious (if they were watching), concluding that he knew they were watching? And if so, would that increase or otherwise alter the watching?

Frank read and heard all kinds of things about modern surveillance, and whenever he asked Edgardo about it on their runs, when they would not be overheard, Edgardo would grin and nod and say “That’s right.” He said “That’s right” to everything, until Frank said “Are you saying you don’t really know what’s going on and neither does anyone else on Earth?”

“That’s right.”

It was an impossible situation. No amount of googling would clarify it, and indeed any very extensive hunt might catch someone’s attention and make his situation worse. Better to lay low. Better to investigate by talking only to people who might know, and wouldn’t tell anyone else, in places where they wouldn’t be overheard. Strange but true; the possibility of electronic surveillance was driving him back to the oldest technology of all, talking out in the open air.

He wondered if Yann knew he was under surveillance, or that he was the reason many people of his acquaintance were also. He was going to have to talk to Yann.

He had discussed with Diane his idea of headhunting Pierzinski, and she had liked it. Carbon sequestration was in large part a biological problem; the amount of carbon they wanted to shift was beyond any currently affordable and deployable industrial capacity. They needed to involve the bacterial world, if they could. Pierzinski had been working on an algorithm that Frank thought might give them a much finer ability to predict and manipulate genomes, and apparently Yann and Eleanor and Marta were having their best successes at the bacterial level.

So he should go to Atlanta and talk to Yann. Add that to his visit to Francesca and he might even tweak the futures market in a way that Caroline could notice and tell him about when she called. And he needed to get a sense of how Pierzinski’s algorithm was coming along, and what Yann might be thinking about how he wanted his work situation to be configured.

But talking to Yann meant he would have to see Marta again. She and Yann lived together, so it seemed that if he flew down to meet with Yann, Marta would have to be part of it one way or another. That might very well be awful. The last time he had seen her had been terrible. However, too bad; he still had to do it. It would end up worse if he went down there and tried to see Yann while avoiding her. That would backfire for sure, although it might not be possible to make her any more angry with him than she already was, so maybe it didn’t matter.