Forty Signs of Rain (27 page)

——

Two mornings later Charlie learned about it in the
Post
(and how irritating was that?):

“Say
what!
” Charlie cried. He hadn’t even heard of the possibility of such a maneuver.

He read paragraphs per eye-twitch while he got on the phone and told it to call Roy:

“Ah shit.
Shit
. God damn it!”

“Charlie, that must be you.”

“Roy what is this shit, when did this happen?”

“Last night. Didn’t you hear?”

“No I didn’t! How could Phil do this!”

“We counted votes, and the biggie wasn’t going to get out of committee. And if it did, the House wasn’t going to go for it. Winston couldn’t deliver, or wouldn’t. So Phil decided to support Ellington on Ellington’s alternative-fuels bill, and he made sure they put more of Ellington’s stuff in the first several shorter bills.”

“And Ellington agreed to vote for it on that basis.”

“That’s right.”

“So Phil traded horses.”

“The comprehensive was going to lose.”

“You don’t know that for sure! They had Speck with them and so they could have carried it on party lines! Who cares what kind of fuel we’re burning if the world has melted! This was
important
, Roy!”

“It wasn’t going to win,” Roy said, enunciating each word. “We
counted the votes and it lost by one. After that we went for what we could. You know Phil. He likes to get things done.”

“As long as they’re easy.”

“You’re still pissed off about this. You should go talk to Phil yourself, maybe it will impact what he does next time. I’ve got to get to a meeting uptown.”

“Okay maybe I’ll do that.”

And as it was another morning of Joe and Dad on the town, he was free to do so. He sat on the Metro, absorbing Joe’s punches and thinking things over, and when he got the stroller out of the elevator on the third floor of the office he drove it straight for Phil, who today was sitting on a desk in the outer conference room, holding court as blithe and bald-faced as a monkey.

Charlie aimed the wadded
Post
like a stick at Phil, who saw him and winced theatrically. “Okay!” he said, palm held out to stop the assault. “Okay kick my ass! Kick my ass right here! But I’ll tell you right now that they made me do it.”

He was turning it into another office debate, so Charlie went for it full bore. “What do you mean they made you do it? You caved, Phil. You gave away the store!”

Phil shook his head vehemently. “I got more than I gave. They’re going to have to reduce carbon emissions anyway, we were never going to get much more from them on that—”

“What do you mean!” Charlie shouted.

Andrea and some of the others came out of their rooms, and even Evelyn looked in, though mostly to say hi to Joe. It was a regular schtick: Charlie hammering Phil for his compromises, Phil admitting to all and baiting Charlie to ever greater outrage. Charlie, recognizing this, was still determined to make his point, even if it meant he had to play his usual part. Even if he didn’t convince Phil himself, if Phil’s group here would bear down on him a little harder …

Charlie whacked Phil with the
Post
. “If you would have stuck to your guns we could have sequestered
billions of tons
of carbon. The whole world’s with us on this!”

Phil made a face. “I would have stuck to my guns, Charlie, but then the rest of our wonderful party would have shot me in the foot with those guns. The House wasn’t there either. This way we got what was possible. We got it out of committee, damn it, and that’s not peanuts. We got out with the full roadless forest requirement and the Arctic refuge and the offshore drilling ban, all of those, and the President has promised to sign them already.”

“They were always gonna give you those! You would have had to have
died
not to get those. Meanwhile you gave up on the really crucial stuff! They played you like a fish.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Did not.”

“Did too!”

Yes, this was the level of debate in the offices of one of the greatest senators in the land. It always came down to that between them.

But this time Charlie wasn’t enjoying it like he usually did. “What
didn’t
you give up,” he said bitterly.

“Just the forests streams and oil of North America!”

Their little audience laughed. It was still a debating society to them. Phil licked his finger and chalked one up, then smiled at Charlie, a shot of the pure Chase grin, fetching and mischievous.

Charlie was unassuaged. “You’d better fund a bunch of submarines to enjoy all those things.”

That too got a laugh. And Phil chalked one up for Charlie, still smiling.

Charlie pushed Joe’s stroller out of the building, cursing bitterly. Joe heard his tone of voice and absorbed himself in the passing scene and his dinosaurs. Charlie pushed him along, sweating, feeling more and more discouraged. He knew he was taking it too seriously, he knew that Phil’s house style was to treat it as a game, to keep taking shots and not worry too much. But still, given the situation, he couldn’t help it. He felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach.

This didn’t happen very often. He usually managed to find some way to compensate in his mind for the various reversals of any political day. Bright side, silver lining, eventual revenge, whatever. Some fantasy in which it all came right. So when discouragement did hit him, it struck home with unaccustomed force. It became a global thing for which he had no defense; he couldn’t see the forest for the trees, he couldn’t see the good in anything. The black clouds had black linings. All bad! Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad.

He pushed into a Metro elevator, descended with Joe into the depths. They got on a car, came to the Bethesda stop. Charlie zombied them out. Bad, bad, bad. Sartrean nausea, induced by a sudden glimpse of reality; horrible that it should be so. That the true nature of reality should be so awful. The blanched air in the elevator was unbreathable. Gravity was too heavy.

Out of the elevator, onto Wisconsin. Bethesda was too dismal. A spew of office and apartment blocks, obviously organized (if that was the word) for the convenience of the cars roaring by. A ridiculous, inhuman autopia. It might as well have been Orange County.

He dragged down the sidewalk home. Walked in the front door. The screen door slapped behind him with its characteristic whack.

From the kitchen: “Hi hon!”

“Hi Dad!”

It was Anna and Nick’s day to come home together after school.

“Momma Momma Momma!”

“Hi Joe!”

Refuge. “Hi guys,” Charlie said. “We need a rowboat. We’ll keep it in the garage.”

“Cool!”

Anna heard his tone of voice and came out of the kitchen with a whisk in hand, gave him a hug and a peck on the cheek.

“Hmm,” he said, a kind of purr.

“What’s wrong babe.”

“Oh, everything.”

“Poor hon.”

He began to feel better. He released Joe from the stroller and they followed Anna into the kitchen. As Anna picked up Joe and held him on her hip while she continued to cook, Charlie began to shape the story of the day in his mind, to be able to tell her about it with all its drama intact.

After he had told the story, and fulminated for a bit, and opened and drunk a beer, Anna said, “What you need is some way to bypass the political process.”

“Whoa babe. I’m not sure I want to know what you mean there.”

“I don’t know anyway.”

“Revolution, right?”

“No way.”

“A completely nonviolent and successful positive revolution?”

“Good idea.”

Nick appeared in the doorway. “Hey Dad, want to play some baseball?”

“Sure. Good idea.”

Nick seldom proposed this, it was usually Charlie’s idea, and so when Nick did it he was trying to make Charlie feel better, which just by itself worked pretty well. So they left the coolness of the house and played in the steamy backyard, under the blind eyes of the banked apartment windows. Nick stood against the brick back of the house while Charlie pitched wiffle balls at him, and he smacked them with a long plastic bat. Charlie tried to catch them if he could. They had about a dozen balls, and when they were scattered over the downsloping lawn, they re-collected them on Charlie’s mound and did it over again, or let Charlie take a turn at bat. The wiffle balls were great; they shot off the bat with a very satisfying plastic
whirr
, and yet it was painless to get hit by one, as Charlie often learned. Back and forth in the livid dusk, sweating and laughing, trying to get a wiffle ball to go straight.

Charlie took off his shirt and sweated into the sweaty air. “Okay here comes the pitch. Sandy Koufax winds up, rainbow curve! Hey why didn’t you swing?”

“That was a ball, Dad. It bounced before it got to me.”

“Okay here I’ll try again. Oh Jesus. Never mind.”

“Why do you say Jesus, Dad?”

“It’s a long story. Okay here’s another one. Hey, why didn’t you swing?”

“It was a ball!”

“Not by much. Walks won’t get you off de island mon.”

“The strike zone is taped here to the house, Dad. Just throw one that would hit inside it and I’ll swing.”

“That was a bad idea. Okay, here you go. Ooh, very nice. Okay, here you go. Hey come on swing at those!”

“That one was
behind me.”

“Switch-hitting is a valuable skill.”

“Just throw strikes!”

“I’m trying. Okay here it comes, boom! Very nice! Home run, wow. Uh-oh, it got stuck in the tree, see that?”

“We’ve got enough anyway.”

“True, but look, I can get a foot onto this branch … here, give me the bat for a second. Might as well get it while we remember where it is.”

Charlie climbed a short distance up the tree, steadied himself, brushed leaves aside, reached in and embraced the trunk for balance, knocked the wiffle ball down with Nick’s bat.

“There you go!”

“Hey Dad, what’s that vine growing up into the tree? Isn’t that poison ivy?”

L
et’s rehearse what we know about who we are. We are primates, very closely related to chimps and other great apes. Our ancestors speciated from the other apes about five million years ago, and evolved in parallel lines and overlapping subspecies, emerging most clearly as hominids about two million years ago
.

East Africa in this period was getting drier and drier. The forest was giving way to grassland savannahs dotted with scattered groves of trees. We evolved to adapt to that landscape: the hairlessness, the upright posture, the sweat glands, and other physical features. They all made us capable of running long distances in the open sun near the equator. We ran for a living and covered broad areas. We used to run game down by following it until it tired out, sometimes days later
.

In that basically stable mode of living the generations passed, and during the many millennia that followed, the size of hominid brains evolved from about three hundred cubic millimeters to about nine hundred cubic millimeters. This is a strange fact, because everything else remained relatively stable. The implication is that the way we lived then was tremendously stimulating to the growth of the brain. Almost every aspect of hominid life has been proposed as the main driver of this growth, everything from the calculation of accurate rock throwing to the ability to dream, but certainly among the most important must have been language and social life. We talked, we got along; it’s a difficult process, requiring lots of thought. Because reproduction is
crucial to any definition of evolutionary success, getting along with the group and with the opposite sex is fundamentally adaptive, and so it must be a big driver of increasing brain size. We grew so fast we can hardly fit through the birth canal these days. All that growth from trying to understand other people, the other sex, and look where we are
.