Fifty Degrees Below (34 page)

The authors of this
Nature
article went on to tentatively suggest that generosity which held no advantage at all to the giver might be structurally sounder in the long run than generosity that brought some kind of return to the cooperator. The paper concluded with the reminder that at the beginning of life, RNA had had to cooperate with proteins and other molecules to band together and form cells. So clearly cooperation was a necessary component of evolution, and a strong adaptive strategy. The authors of the paper admitted that the reasons for the success of cooperation were not well understood. But certain proteins now ubiquitous in cells must have gotten there by being always generous.

Falling asleep in his tent, swaying gently, Frank thought: Now that is interesting . . . suggestive . . . something to be tried. I will be like that protein . . . or like Anna at work . . . I will be

always generous.

Winter came.

His treehouse was now visible from the ground, if one knew what to look for. But who was looking? And if anyone saw it, what could they do about it? Theoretically someone could lie in wait nearby, then arrest him or ambush him. But as he hiked in the park under the bare-limbed skeletal trees, over ground thick with rime-frosted and snow-drifted leaves, he could see sometimes half a mile in all directions, and in truth the park was nearly depopulate. He was much more likely to see deer than people. The only humans out in the area near his treehouse tended to be park staff or other FOG volunteers; and many of these were acquaintances by now. Even strangers did not represent a danger, during the day anyway. People out there in winter were often interested in being alone. You could tell when you spotted them whether this was true or not, in another of those unconscious calculations that the savannah brain was so good at. But mostly he just saw deer. He hiked the empty forest, looking for the aurochs and seeing only deer; although once he spotted what looked to him like an ibex, and Nancy ID’ed as a chamois.

The other ferals he spotted were often suffering from the cold, and the sudden absence of leaves. Many of these animals were tropical or subtropical, and even if they could have withstood the cold, the disappearance of the leaves meant their food was gone. Seeing an eland snuffling in a pile of leaves packed into a windrow gave one a new respect for the native animals, who could survive such drastic changes in the environment. It was a tough biome, and the natives were tough customers. The coyotes were even getting kind of brash.

The zoo staff and FOG were now recapturing every endangered feral they could. The ones that remained elusive, or seemed to be doing okay, were aided by heated feeding stations. These were mostly simple two-walled shelters, Ls with their open sides facing south. Frank helped build some, lifting panels and beams of playground plastic to be screwed into place. A few shelters were three-walled, and had trap doors suspended over their open sides, so that the zoo staff could capture animals inside them. None of the FOG members liked it, but it beat a mass die-off.

So now there were parts of the park that seemed like an open-air or unwalled zoo, with animals of many different species hanging out near the shelters and visiting when their kind of food was put out. It looked to Frank like these creatures felt they had returned to the zoo already, and were content to be there.

But not all the ferals came in from the cold. And some of the stubbornest animals were among those least capable of surviving. The gibbons and siamangs were only going to the shelters that did not have trapdoors, and leaving them as soon as they had eaten. The gibbons continued to brachiate through the leafless trees. The siamangs had been seen walking around, their long arms raised over their heads to keep them from dragging on the ground; it looked like they were trying to find someone to surrender to, but if they saw people approaching they tarzanned away at high speed.

Both species were also now joining the ferals who were venturing out of the park into the residential neighborhoods nearby, finding sources of heat and food on their own; one siamang had been electrocuted while sleeping on a transformer, but now the rest didn’t do that anymore. The gibbons Bert and May and their sons had been reported sleeping in a kid’s backyard tree house.

“If they obviously don’t want to be recaptured,” Frank said to Nancy, “then we should help them from the shelters and let them stay feral.” He knew most of the FOG membership felt the same.

But Nancy only said, “I’m afraid that unless we bring them in, we’ll lose a lot of them.”

December days were too short. He tried to get in a brief animal walk at dawn; then it was over to work, where things were hectic as always. Along with the Gulf Stream project, Frank’s committee was involved with organizing a series of trials of various clean energy sources, especially solar; they were trying to determine which was closest to ready for mass production, the latest photovoltaics or flexible mirrors that redirected sunlight to elements that transformed the heat to electricity. Both showed some promise, and trials of the Stirling transformer were making the mirrors look unexpectedly competitive, although the various photovoltaics were always gaining in efficiency, and getting cheaper too. It seemed that one system or other might soon be ready for mass deployment, which would greatly reduce the amount of carbon still being tossed into the atmosphere.

Into these and other matters Frank threw himself, and the work days passed in their usual rush; and then in the dusk, or in full dark, he hiked down into the park and climbed his hanging ladder.

Recline on his groundpad, then, in the open doorway of his tent. Only when it was windy did he retreat fully inside. As long as the air remained still, his heavy sleeping bag had kept him warm on climbs in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic; it would do the same here. And the nights were too beautiful to miss. The highest branches spiked around him like a forest of giant thorns, the stars brilliant through their black calligraphy. He watched the stars, and read his laptop, or a paperback set under the lantern, until sleep came on him; then snuggled into the bag; slept well; woke serene, to the sight of the treetops bobbing and rustling on the dawn breeze. Lines of blackbirds flew out of town to look for food, under a flat sky of pewter and lead. Really the important thing was to be out in the world, to feel the wind and see the full spaciousness of being on a planet whirling through space. A feeling of beatitude; was that the right word? Sit up, click on the laptop, google “beatitude”; then there on the screen:

“
beatitude
dips from on high down on us and we
see
. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds.”

My. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from a website called Emersonfortheday.net. Frank read a little more: quite amazing stuff. He bookmarked the site, which apparently featured a new thought from the philosopher’s writings every few days. Earlier samples read like some miraculously profound horoscope or fortune cookie. Reading them, Frank suddenly realized that the people who had lived before him in this immense hardwood forest had had epiphanies much like his. Emerson, the great Transcendentalist, had already sketched the parameters or the route to a new kind of nature-worshipping religion. His journal entries in particular suited Frank’s late night go-to-sleep reading, for the feel they had of someone thinking on the page. This was a good person to know about.

One night after he fell asleep skimming the site, his cell phone jolted him awake. “Hello?”

“Frank, it’s Caroline.”

“Oh good.” He was already sitting up.

“Can you come see me, in the same place?”

“Yes. When will you be there?”

“Half an hour.”

She was sitting on the same bench, under the bronze dancer. When she saw him approaching she stood, and they embraced. He felt her against him. For a long time they breathed in and out, their bodies pressed together. A lot was conveyed, somehow. He could feel that she had been having a hard time—that she was lonely—that she needed him, in the same way he needed her.

They sat on the bench, holding hands.

“So,” she said. “You’ve been traveling.”

“Yes?”

“Boston, Atlanta—Khembalung, even?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“But—I mean—I told you this Pierzinski was probably the reason you were listed, right? And Francesca Taolini is on the list too?”

“Yes, you did.” Frank shrugged. “I needed to talk to them. I couldn’t do my job without talking to them. So I thought I’d go ahead, and see if you noticed any, I don’t know—change in my status or whatever.”

“Yes. I did.”

“So, were we taped?”

“No. You mean beyond your office phones? No. Not yet.”

“Interesting.”

She gazed at him curiously. “You know, this could be serious. It’s not a game.”

“I know that, believe me. I’m not thinking of it as a game. More like an experiment.”

“But you don’t want to draw any more attention to yourself.”

“I suppose not, but why? What could they do to me?”

“Oh I don’t know. Every agency has its inspector general. You could suddenly find your travel expenses questioned, or your outside consulting. You could lose your job, if they really wanted to make it happen.”

“Then I’d just go back to UCSD.”

“I hope you don’t do that.”

He squeezed her hand. “Okay, but tell me more. How did my status change exactly?”

“You went up a level.”

“So my stock rose?”

“It did. But that’s a different issue. Your stock rose, fine, but that means it hit an amount that triggered your level of surveillance to go up. At that level, you’ll have more intrusive methods applied to you. It’s all set in the programs.”

“But why, what for?”

“I’m sure it’s something to do with Pierzinski, like you said last time. Taolini was really googling him after your trip to Boston, him and you both.”

“She was?”

“Yeah. She called up pretty much everything you’ve ever published. And lots of Pierzinski too. What did you two talk about?”

“She was on the panel I ran that reviewed Pierzinski’s proposal.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So, we talked about the work he’s doing, stuff like that.”

“She looks like she’s cute.”

“Yes.”

He didn’t know what to say. She laughed at him, squeezed his hand. Now that he was with her he understood that the others were all just displacements of his real desire. “So my calls are being recorded?”

“Your office calls, yes. I told you that last time.”

“I guess you did. And my cell phone?”

“They’re being recorded now too, but so far no one’s actually checking them. They’re just saved in your file. If you went up another level or two, they’d be there, and they’d get reviewed.”

“And what about my FOG phone?”

“No, not that one. Isn’t that just a walkie-talkie system?”

“Yeah.”

“Those only work off one tower. I have to call your cell, but I don’t like doing that anymore. I’m calling you from public phones, so someone would have to make a complete search of your file to find me, but I’m in there if they look hard enough. If someone knows my voice. . . Meanwhile, they can tell where you were when you got calls because of the towers involved.”

“So you know where I am?”

“To an extent. Your van is tagged too. I can see you’re spending time over near Rock Creek Park. Have you got a place over there?”

“Yes.”

“You must be renting a room? There aren’t any home arrangements showing. No water or electric or home phone or sewage.”

“No.”

“So you’re renting a room?”

“Like that, yes.”

She considered him. She squeezed his hand again. “I . . . well. I hope you trust me.”

“Oh I do. It’s just that I’m, I don’t know. Embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

“Yes. Only not really.” He met her gaze. “I live in a tree house. I’m out in Rock Creek Park, living up in a little tree house I built.”

She laughed. Then she leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Good for you! Will you take me up to it sometime?”

“Oh yes,” he said, warming. “I’d like that very much.”

She was still leaning into him. They leaned, wordlessly feeling the pressure of arm against arm. Then they shifted, and suddenly were kissing.

It all came instantly back to him, how it felt. He fell headlong back into the space they had occupied when they were trapped in the elevator, as though the intervening months had vanished and they were back there again in an eternal now, passionately making out. Nowhere but in their little bubble universe.

After some indeterminate time, they paused for breath. Such intensity could not be maintained; it had to lead somewhere else, either forward to orgasm or backward to talk. And since they were out on a park bench; since there were still so many questions pricking at other parts of his mind; he fell back toward talk. He wanted to know more—

But then she pulled him back to her to kiss again, and obviously that was a much better idea. Passion blew through him again, sexual passion, my God who could explain it? Who could even remember what it was like?

Again it went on for some time, he couldn’t have said how long. The night was cold, her fingers were cool. The city rumbled around them. Distant siren. He liked the feel of her body under her clothes: ribby ribs, soft breasts. The iron solidity of her quads. She squeezed him, gasped and murmured a little, all through their kisses.

Again they came up for air.

“Oh my,” she said. She shifted on the bench, conformed herself to him like a cat.

“Yes.”

His questions slowly resurfaced. He looked down at her face, tucked against his shoulder.

“Are you staying with your friends again?”

“Yes.” She looked at her watch. “Uh oh.”

“What time is it?”

“Four.”

“Wow. The witching hour.”