Fifty Degrees Below (29 page)

In Frank’s meetings with her, Diane did not refer to this part of the struggle, preferring to discuss the technical aspects of their work. The North Atlantic project was still being researched, and Diane still liked it very much, but she was very concerned that they also pursue a vigorous hunt for some biologically based carbon capture method. Frank wondered if the legal and political problems inherent in releasing a genetically modified organism into the environment could ever be overcome; but he knew exactly who to call about the technical aspects of it, of course.

He had been thinking of calling Marta and Yann again anyway. So, after a meeting with Diane, he steeled himself to the task. Thinking of the surveillance issue, he wondered if he should call them from a public phone, but realized both ends had to be unsurveiled for that to work. No, best to do this work in the open and let the chips fall where they may, the stocks rise as they might. So he called them at their Small Delivery numbers, from his office.

“Hi Marta, it’s Frank. I wanted to talk to you and Yann about the carbon capture work you described to me. Can you tell me how that study is coming along, I mean just in general terms?”

“It’s going okay.”

“So, you know—in the absence of long-term field studies, have you gotten any back-of-the-envelopes on how quickly it might work, or how much it might draw down?”

“We can only extrapolate from lab results.”

“And what does that indicate, if anything?”

“It could be considerable.”

“I see.”

Marta said, “How’s the San Diego project coming along?”

“Oh good, good. I mean, I’m recused from any direct action on that front, but I’m following the process, and people at UCSD and in the biotech community there are really excited about it. So I think something will happen.”

“And we’ll have a place in it?”

“Yes, well, they’re working on an offer. There’s going to be a kind of MacArthur award committee disbursing some research money; it won’t be quite as unconstrained as MacArthur money, but there will be a lot of it, and it will be awarded without applications to people judged deserving.”

“I see.” Marta’s voice was still heavy with skepticism, but Frank noted that she was not being actively hostile either. “Well, I look forward to seeing how that goes.”

“It would surely help you if you’re ever going to try to deploy anything like this lichen you’ve described.”

“We’ve got an array of options,” she said shortly, and would not elaborate.

Next morning at NSF he found out from Edgardo that Diane had been in a fight with the president’s Science Advisor, Dr. Zacharius Strengloft. Strengloft had suggested to her in a meeting at the Capitol with the Senate Natural Resources Committee that NSF should keep to what it was good at, which meant disbursing grant money. Diane had given him her Look of Stone and then told him in no uncertain terms that NSF was run by her and the National Science Board and no one else. Senate and staff who had witnessed the confrontation would of course take differing meanings from it.

Soon after that Diane convened a full meeting of the National Science Board, which was NSF’s board of directors, in effect. The twenty-four members of the board had all been appointed by the president, from a list which, though vetted by Strengloft, had been created by the National Academy of Sciences and other sources. This meant they were a mixed-ideology group, and clearly Diane wanted to make sure they were behind her for the coming battles. She made it a closed meeting, and when she came out of it Frank couldn’t tell if she had gotten what she wanted or not. But later she told him they had been almost unanimous in their support for NSF trying to coordinate a national response, even an international response. Then he saw again the little smile that crossed her face sometimes when she had gotten her way in these struggles. She seemed unflustered, even content. She shook her head wonderingly as she told Frank about it, put a hand to his arm, as in the gym, smiled her little smile. What a strange game they were caught in, she seemed to say. But clearly no one was going to intimidate her. Frank certainly wouldn’t want to be the one to try it.

Meanwhile, to implement anything in the North Atlantic, they would have to coordinate plans with the IPCC, and the rest of the UN, and really the whole world; get approvals, get funding, get the actual materials manufactured or gathered, whatever they might be.

Eventually this need to liase with international agencies impelled them to arrange a day’s meetings in the UN building in New York. Diane asked Frank to join her for a few of these, and he was happy to agree.

“Easy travel to other planets,” he said.

“What?”

“Manhattan.”

“Oh, yes.”

When hanging with the bros in the evenings, Frank sometimes became curious about their plans. The picnic tables and fireplace were not going to hack it as winter furniture. The fireplace was such a misbegotten thing, like a pizza oven placed on the ground, that it was useless for heating, cooking, or fire-gazing. Perhaps that was the point; surely the men of the CCC, or whoever had built the thing, had to have known better. Some of the other picnic sites had open fire rings; but the bros had chosen to hang here by the oven.

One night Frank arrived to find they had tried to solve this problem by commandeering a steel trash barrel and starting a fire inside it, a fire that only just flickered over its rim. Possibly the entire barrel gave off some radiant heat, and the fire would not be visible from a distance, of course, if that was a concern. But it was a miserable excuse for a campfire.

“Hey Perfesser!” Zeno bellowed. “How’s it hanging, man? We haven’t seen you for a while.”

The others chimed in with their habitual welcomes. “He’s been too
busy
!” “Those co-eds
wanted
him.”

They were all bulked up, thick with thrift shop sweaters and coats, and also, Frank was pleased to see, greasy down jackets. Old down jackets were probably cheap, being unfashionable; and there was nothing better in the cold.

“Hey,” he said. “Super long time. What was it, yesterday?”

“Yarrr. Ha ha ha.”

“I know you’ve done so much you want to tell me about.”

“HA!!!” They crowed their approval of this jape. “We ain’t done a fucking thing! Why should we?”

And yet it soon transpired that they had all experienced an extraordinary number of traumas since Frank last came around. They interrupted each other ceaselessly as they related them, making a mish-mash that no one could have followed, but Frank knew from the start not to try. “Yeah
right,
” was all he had to say from time to time. Again it struck him how well they recalled scrapes, scuffles, or fights; they could re-enact every move in slow motion, and did so when telling their tale—it was part of the tale, maybe the most interesting part: “I twisted like this, and he missed over my
shoulder,
like this, and then I ducked,” ducking and weaving against the absent but well-remembered opponent.

“We had to pull him right
off
the guy, yeah! I had to peel his fingers right off of his
neck
! He was pounding his head right against the
concrete
.”

Finally they were done. Frank said, “Hey, your fire? It sucks.”

A shout of agreement and dissent. Zeno said, “Hey whaddya mean, dude? It’s perfect for shoving yer head in the can!”

“YARRR.”

“That’s the only way you could see it,” Frank countered. “Why don’t you go where one of the good firepits are?”

They laughed at his naÏveté. “That’d be too
good
for us!”

“Might have us a
fire
if we did that!”

One of them mimed a karate kick at the stone oven. “Piece of shit.”

“You need fire,” Frank said.

“We GOT a fire.”

“Can’t you knock the top of this thing off, or make a fire ring next to it or something? Aren’t there any demolition sites or construction sites around here where you could get some cinder blocks?”

“Don’t be bringing the man down on us any more than he already is,” Fedpage said.

“Whatever,” Frank said. “You’re gonna freeze your asses off.”

“It’s a half-assed fire.”

“You have to put your hands right on the metal, it’s ridiculous.”

“No fucking way, it’s warm from here!”

“Yeah right.”

They settled in. The topic shifted to winter and winterizing in general, so Frank sat back and listened. No way were they going to respond to his words by jumping out into the night and putting together a decent fire ring. If that had been their style they wouldn’t be out here in the first place. Maybe later it would sink in.

A few of them discussed the prospects of sleeping at the Metro stops just coming back on line; the regulars for these spots had dispersed, so that good grates were going unclaimed. You could nest on a good site all day. But that risked a poorly-timed rousting by the cops. But if you didn’t take the risk, you weren’t likely to find a good spot.

Zeno declared he was going to build a hut and sleep right there by their site. Others agreed immediately that good shelters could be made. It all sounded hypothetical to Frank, he thought they were just covering for the fact that they didn’t want to talk about where they really slept.

That made sense to Frank; he wasn’t telling people where he slept either. The bros were under a different kind of surveillance than he was, more erratic but potentially much more immediate, with consequences much worse than Frank’s (one hoped). They had police records, many of them extensive. Technically much of what they were doing was illegal, including being in Rock Creek Park at all. Luckily a lot of people were doing the same thing. It was the herd defense; predators would pick off the weak, but the bulk of the herd would be okay. The more the better, therefore, up to a point—a point they had not yet reached, even though many little squatter settlements and even what could be called shanty towns were now visible in flood-damaged parts of town, especially in the parks. Ultimately this might trigger some large-scale crackdown, and Rock Creek Park was high profile. But the gorge’s new ravine walls were steep and unstable, impossible to patrol at night. To clear the gorge they would have to do it by day and call out the National Guard—both of them, as Zeno always added. If they did that the bros could slip away into the city, or north into the forest across the Maryland border.

Meanwhile, out of sight, out of mind. They were off the grid, they had slung their hooks, they had lit out for the territory. The firelight bounced on their worn faces, etching each knock and crease. Little more of them could be seen, making it seem like a circle of disembodied faces—masks again—or a Rockwell Kent woodblock.

“There was this guy living on the streets in San Francisco who turned out was like totally rich, he was heir to a fortune but he just liked living outdoors.”

“But he was a drunk too, right?”

“Fucking George Carlin is so funny.”

“They said I was grade ten but they wouldn’t give me dental.”

Blah blah blah. Frank recalled a fire from his youth: two climber gals slightly buzzed had come bombing into Camp Four around midnight and hauled him away from a dying fire, insisting that he join them in a midnight swim in the Merced River, and who could say no to that. Though it was shocking cold water and pitch black to boot, more a good idea than a comfortable reality, swimming with two naked California women in the Yosemite night. But then when they got out and staggered back to the fire, near dead from hypothermia, it had been necessary to pile on wood until it was a leaping yellow blaze and dance before it to catch every pulse of lifesaving heat. Even at the time Frank had understood that he would never see anything more beautiful.

Now he sat with a bunch of red-faced homeless guys bundled in their greasy down jackets, around a fire hidden at the bottom of a trashcan. The contrast with the night at Camp Four was so complete that it made him laugh. It made the two nights part of the same thing somehow.

“We should build a real fire,” he said.

No one moved. Ashes rose on the smoke from the trashcan. Frank reached in with a two-by-four and tried to stir it up enough to give them some flame over the rim. “If you have a fire but you can’t see it,” he said as he jabbed, “then you go out of your mind.”

Fedpage snorted. “Central heating, right?”

“So everyone’s crazy, yarr. Of course they are.”

“
We
certainly are.”

“Is that what did it hey?”

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

“When did someone first say that, a million years ago? Oooop! Ooop! Oooop!”

“Hey there monkey man, quit that now! You sound like Meg Ryan in that movie.”

“Ha ha haaaa! That was so fucking funny.”

“She was faking it! She was
faking it
.”

“I’ll take it fake or not.”

“As if you could tell!”

“—greatest human vocalization ever recorded.”

“Yeah right, you obviously don’t know your porn.”

Things that would warm a body: laughter; re-enacting fights; playing air guitar; playing with fire; talking about sex; thinking about climber gals.

Knocking a stone oven apart would definitely warm the body. Frank got up. What he needed was a sledgehammer and a crowbar; what they had were some lengths of two-by-four and an old aluminum baseball bat, already much dented.

One stone in the little opening at the top was loose in its cement. Frank moved to what looked like the right angle and smashed the stone with a two-by-four. The bros were pleased at the diversion, they guffawed and urged him on. He knocked the first stone down into the firepit, reached into the ashes and rolled it out. After that it was a matter of knocking loose one stone at a time. He used the longest two-by-four and pounded away. The cement was old, and stone by stone the firepit came down.

When he had gotten it down to knee height it made a sensible firepit, with a gap in one side where the old doorway had been. He filled the gap with stones. There were enough left over to make another firepit if they wanted one. Or maybe bench supports, if they found some planks.