Forty Signs of Rain (12 page)

Nothing Leo could do about it. He couldn’t even publish his results.

T
HE QUIBLERS’ small house was located at the end of a street of similar houses. All of them stood blankly, blinds drawn, no clues given as to who lived inside. They could have been empty for all an outsider could tell: no cars in the driveways, no kids in the yards, no yard or porch activity of any kind. They could have been walled compounds in Saudi Arabia, hiding their life from the desert outside.

Walking these streets with Joe on his back, Charlie assumed as he always did that these houses were mostly owned by people who worked in the District, people who were always either working or on vacation. Their homes were places to sleep. Charlie had been that way himself before the boys had arrived. That was how people lived in Bethesda, west of Wisconsin Avenue—west all the way to the Pacific, Charlie didn’t know. But he didn’t think so; he tended to put it on Bethesda specifically.

So he walked to the grocery store shaking his head as he always did. “It’s like a ghost town, Joe, it’s like some
Twilight Zone
episode in which we’re the only two people left on Earth.”

Then they rounded the corner, and all thought of ghost towns was rendered ridiculous. Shopping center. They walked through the automatic glass doors into a giant Giant grocery store. Joe, excited by the place as always, stood up in his baby backpack, his knees on Charlie’s
shoulders, and whacked Charlie on the ears as if he were directing an elephant. Charlie reached up, lifted him around and stuffed him into the baby seat of the grocery cart, strapped him down with the cart’s little red seat belt. A very useful feature, that.

Okay. Buddhists coming to dinner, Asians from the mouth of the Ganges. He had no idea what to cook. He assumed they were vegetarians. It was not unusual for Anna to invite people from NSF over to dinner and then be somewhat at a loss in the matter of the meal itself. But Charlie liked that. He enjoyed cooking, though he was not good at it, and had gotten worse in the years since the boys had arrived. Time had grown short, and he and Anna had both cooked and recooked their repertoire of recipes until they were sick of them, and yet hadn’t learned anything new. So now they often did takeout, or ate as plainly as Nick; or Charlie tried something new and botched it. Dinner guests were a chance to do that again.

Now he decided to resuscitate an old recipe from their student years, pasta with an olive and basil sauce that a friend had first cooked for them in Italy. He wandered the familiar aisles of the store, looking for the ingredients. He should have made a list. On a typical trip he would go home having forgotten something crucial, and today he wanted to avoid that, but he was also thinking of other things, and making comments aloud from time to time. Joe’s presence disguised his tendency to talk to himself in public spaces. “Okay, whole peeled tomatoes, pitted kalamatas, olive oil extra virgin first cold press—it’s the first press that really matters,” slipping into their friend’s Italian accent, “now vat I am forgetting, hm, hm, oh, ze pasta! But you must never keel ze pasta, my God! Oh and bread. And wine, but not more than we can carry home, huh Joe.”

Groceries tucked into the backpack pocket under Joe’s butt, and slung in plastic bags from both hands, Charlie walked Joe back along the empty street to their house, singing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” one of Joe’s favorites. Then they were up the steps and home.

Their street dead-ended in a little triangle of trees next to Woodson Ave, a feeder road that poured its load of cars onto Wisconsin south. It
was a nice location, within sight of Wisconsin and yet peaceful. An old four-story apartment block wrapped around their backyard like a huge brick sound barrier, its stacked windows like a hundred live webcasts streaming all at once, daily lives that were much too partial and mundane to be interesting. No
Rear Window
here, and thank God for that. The wall of apartments was like a dull screensaver, and might as well have been trees, though trees would have been nicer. The world outside was irrelevant. Each nuclear family in its domicile is inside its own pocket universe, and for the time it is together it exists inside a kind of event horizon: no one sees it and it sees no one. Millions of pocket universes, scattered across the surface of the planet like the dots of light in nighttime satellite photos.

On this night, however, the bubble containing the Quiblers was breached. Visitors from afar, aliens! When the doorbell rang they almost didn’t recognize the sound.

Anna was occupied with Joe and a diaper upstairs, so Charlie left the kitchen and hurried through the house to answer the door. Four men in off-white cotton pants and shirts stood on the stoop, like visitors from Calcutta; only their vests were the maroon color Charlie associated with Tibetan monks. Joe had run to the top of the stairs, and he grabbed a banister to keep his balance, agog at the sight of them. In the living room Nick was struck shy, his nose quickly back into his book, but he was glancing over the top of it frequently as the strangers were ushered in and made comfortable around him. Charlie offered them drinks, and they accepted beers, and when he came back with those, Anna and Joe were downstairs and had joined the fun. Two of their visitors sat on the living room floor, laughing off Anna’s offer of the little couches, and they all put their beer bottles on the coffee table.

The oldest monk and the youngest one leaned back against the radiator, down at Joe’s level, and soon they were engaged with his vast collection of blocks—a heaping mound of plain or painted cubes, rhomboids, cylinders and other polygons, which they quickly assembled into walls and towers, working with and around Joe’s Godzilla-like interventions.

The young one, Drepung, answered Anna’s questions directly, and also
translated for the oldest one, named Rudra Cakrin. Rudra was the official ambassador of Khembalung, but while he was without English, apparently, his two middle-aged associates, Sucandra and Padma Sambhava, spoke it pretty well—not as well as Drepung, but adequately.

These two followed Charlie back out into the kitchen and stood there, beer bottles in hand, talking to him as he cooked. They stirred the unkilled pasta to keep the pot from boiling over, checked out the spices in the spice rack, and stuck their noses deep into the saucepot, sniffing with great interest and appreciation. Charlie found them surprisingly easy to talk to. They were about his age. Both had been born in Tibet, and both had spent years, they did not say how many, imprisoned by the Chinese, like so many other Tibetan Buddhist monks. They had met in prison, and after their release they had crossed the Himalayas and escaped Tibet together, afterward making their way gradually to Khembalung.

“Amazing,” Charlie kept saying to their stories. He could not help but compare these to his own relatively straightforward and serene passage through the years. “And now, after all that, you’re getting flooded?”

“Many times,” they said in unison. Padma, still sniffing Charlie’s sauce as if it were the perfect ambrosia, elaborated. “Used to happen only every eighteen years or about, moon tides, you know. We could plan it happening, and be prepared. But now, whenever the monsoon hits hard.”

“Also every month at moon tide,” Sucandra added. “Certainly three, four times a year. No one can live that way for long. If it gets worse, then the island will no longer be habitable. So we came here.”

Charlie shook his head, tried to joke: “This place may be lower in elevation than your island.”

They laughed politely. Not the funniest joke. Charlie said, “Listen, speaking of elevation, have you talked to the other low-lying countries?”

Padma said, “Oh yes, we are part of the League of Drowning Nations, of course. Charter member.”

“Headquarters in The Hague, near the World Court.”

“Very appropriate,” Charlie said. “And now you are establishing an embassy here.…”

“To argue our case, yes.”

Sucandra said, “We must speak to the hyperpower.”

The two men smiled cheerily.

“Well. That’s very interesting.” Charlie tested the pasta to see if it was ready. “I’ve been working on climate issues myself, for Senator Chase. I’ll have to get you in there to talk to him. And you need to hire a good firm of lobbyists too.”

“Yes?” They regarded him with interest. Padma said, “You think it best?”

“Yes. Definitely. You’re here to lobby the U.S. government, that’s what it comes down to. And there are pros in town to help foreign governments do that. I used to do it myself, and I’ve still got a good friend working for one of the better firms. I’ll put you in touch with him and you can see what he tells you.”

Charlie slipped on potholders and lifted the pasta pot over to the sink, tipped it into the colander until it was overflowing. Always a problem with their little colander, which he never thought to replace except at moments like this. “I think my friend’s firm already represents the Dutch on these issues—oops—so it’s a perfect match. They’ll be knowledgeable about your suite of problems, you’ll fit right in there.”

“Do they lobby for Tibet?”

“That I don’t know. Separate issues, I should think. But they have a lot of client countries. You’ll see how they fit your needs when you talk to them.”

They nodded. “Thank you for that. We will enjoy that.”

They took the food into the little dining room, which was a kind of corner in the passageway between kitchen and living room, and with a great deal of to-and-froing, all of them just managed to fit around the dining room table. Joe consented to a booster seat to get his head up to the level of the table, where he shoveled baby food industriously into his mouth or onto the floor as the case might be, narrating the process all the while in his own tongue. Sucandra and Rudra Cakrin had seated themselves on either side of him, and they watched his performance with pleasure. Both attended to him as if they thought he was speaking a real
language. They ate in a style that was not that dissimilar to his, Charlie thought—absorbed, happy, shoveling it in. The sauce was a hit with everyone but Nick, who ate his pasta plain. Joe tossed a roll across the table at Nick, who batted it aside expertly, and all the Khembalis laughed.

Charlie got up and followed Anna out to the kitchen when she went to get the salad. He said to her under his breath, “I bet the old man speaks English too.”

“What?”

“It’s like in that Ang Lee movie, remember? The old man pretends not to understand English, but really he does? It’s like that I bet.”

Anna shook her head. “Why would he do that? It’s a hassle, all that translating. It doesn’t give him any advantage.”

“You don’t know that! Watch his eyes, see how he’s getting it all.”

“He’s just paying attention. Don’t be silly.”

“You’ll see.” Charlie leaned into her conspiratorially: “Maybe he learned English in an earlier incarnation. Just be aware of that when you’re talking around him.”

“Quit it,” she said, laughing her low laugh.
“You
be aware.
You
learn to pay attention like that.”

“Oh and then you’ll believe I understand English?”

“That’s right yeah.”

They returned to the dining room, laughing, and found Joe holding forth in a language anyone could understand, a language of imperious gesture and commanding eye, and the assumption of authority in the world. Which worked like a charm over them all, even though he was babbling.

After salad, and seconds on the pasta, they returned to the living room and settled around the coffee table again. Anna brought out tea and cookies. “We’ll have to have Tibetan tea next time,” she said.

The Khembalis nodded uncertainly.

“An acquired taste,” Drepung suggested. “Not actually tea as you know it.”

“Bitter,” Padma said appreciatively.

“You can use as blood coagulant,” Sucandra said.

Drepung added, “Also we add yak butter to it, aged until a bit rancid.”

“The butter has to be rancid?” Charlie said.

“Traditional.”

“Think fermentation,” Sucandra explained.

“Well, let’s have that for sure. Nick will love it.”

A scrunch-faced pretend-scowl from Nick: Yeah right Dad.

Rudra Cakrin sat again with Joe on the floor. He stacked blocks into elaborate towers. Whenever they began to sway, Joe leaned in and chopped them to the floor. Tumbling
clack
of colored wood, instant catastrophe: the two of them cast their heads back and laughed in exactly the same way. Kindred souls.

The others watched. From the couch Drepung observed the old man, smiling fondly, although Charlie thought he also saw traces of the look that Anna had tried to describe to him when explaining why she had invited them to lunch in the first place: a kind of concern that came perhaps from an intensity of love. Charlie knew that feeling. It had been a good idea to invite them over. He had groaned when Anna told him about it, life was simply Too Busy for more to be added. Or so it had seemed; though at the same time he was somewhat starved for adult company. Now he was enjoying himself, watching Rudra Cakrin and Joe play on the floor as if there were no tomorrow.

Anna was deep in conversation with Sucandra. Charlie heard Sucandra say to her, “We give patients quantities, very small, keep records, of course, and judge results. There is a personal element to all medicine, as you know. People talking about how they feel. You can average numbers, I know you do that, but the subjective feeling remains.”

Anna nodded, but Charlie knew she thought this aspect of medicine was unscientific, and it annoyed her as such. She kept to the quantitative as much as she could in her work, as far as he could tell, precisely to avoid this kind of subjective residual in the facts.

Now she said, “But you do support attempts to make objective studies of such matters?”

“Of course,” Sucandra replied. “Buddhist science is much like Western science in that regard.”

Anna nodded, brow furrowed like a hawk. Her definition of science was extremely narrow. “Reproducible studies?”

“Yes, that is Buddhism precisely.”