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He had had it all. And so change be damned! Charlie wanted to live on in this life forever. Or if not forever, then as long as the stars. And he feared change, as being the probable degradation of a situation that couldn’t be bettered.
But here it was anyway, and there was no avoiding it. All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived. This was what the Khembalis were always saying; it was one of the Buddhist basics. And now Charlie had to try to believe it.
So, the day came when he got up, and Anna left for work, then Nick for school; then it was Joe and Da’s time, the whole day spread before them like a big green park. But on this day, Charlie prepped them both to leave, while talking up the change in the routine. ‘Big day, Joe! We’re off to school and work, to the White House! They have a great daycare center there, it’ll be like Gymboree!’
Joe looked up. ‘Gymboree?’
‘Yes, like Gymboree, but not it exactly.’ Charlie’s mood plummeted as he thought of the differences – not one hour but five, or six, or eight, or twelve – and not parents and children together, but the child alone in a crowd of strangers. And he had never even liked Gymboree!
More and more depressed, he strapped Joe into his stroller and pushed him down to the Metro. The tunnel walls were still discolored or even wet in places, and Joe checked everything out as on any other trip. This was one of their routines.
Phil himself was not installed in the White House yet, but the arrangements had been made for Joe to join the daycare there, after which Charlie would leave and walk over to the senate offices in the old Joiner’s Union building. Up and out of the Metro, into warm air, under low windy clouds. People scudded underneath them, hurrying from one shelter to the next before rain hit.
Charlie had gotten out at Smithsonian, and the Mall was almost empty, only a few runners in sight. He pushed Joe along faster and faster, feeling more and more desolate – unreasonably so, almost to the point of despair – especially as Joe continued to babble on happily, energized by the Mall and the brewing storm, no doubt expecting something like their usual picnic and play session on the Mall. Hours that no matter how tedious they had seemed at the time were now revealed as precious islands in eternity, as paradises lost. And it was impossible to convey to Joe that today was going to be different. ‘Joe, I’m going to drop you off at the daycare center here at the White House. You’re going to get to play with the other kids and the teachers and you have to do what the teachers say for a long time.’
‘Cool Dad. Play!’
‘Yeah that’s right. Maybe you’ll love it.’
It was at least possible. Vivid in Charlie’s mind was Anna’s story about taking Nick to daycare for the first time, and seeing Nick’s expression of stoic resignation, which had pierced her so; Charlie had seen the look himself, taking Nick in those first few times. But Joe was no stoic, and would never resign himself to anything. Charlie was anticipating something more like chaos and disorder, perhaps even mayhem, Joe moving from protest to tirade to rampage. But who knew? The way Joe was acting these days, anything was possible. He might love it. He could be gregarious, and he liked crowds and parties. It was really more a matter of liking them too much, taking them too far.
In any case, in they went. Security check, and then inside and down the hall to the daycare center, a well-appointed and very clean place. Lots of little kids running around among toys and play structures, train sets and bookshelves and legos and all. Joe’s eyes grew round. ‘Hey Dad! Big Gymboree!’
‘That’s right, like Gymboree. Except I’m going to go, Joe. I’m going to go and leave you here.’
‘Bye Dad!’ And off he ran without a backward glance.
TWO Cut to the Chase (#ulink_1eef8b0c-e5b9-5e3c-9c03-30a92a104ff7)
‘And if you think this is utopian, please think also why it is such.’
—Brecht
Phil Chase was a man with a past. He was one of Congress’s Vietnam vets, and that was by and large a pretty rambunctious crowd. They had license to be a little crazy, and not all of them took it, but it was there if they wanted it.
Phil had wanted it. He had always played that card to the hilt. Unconventional, unpredictable, devil-may-care, friend of McCain. And for well over a decade, his particular shtick had been to be the World’s Senator, phoning in his work or jetting into D.C. at the last hour to make votes he had to make in person. All this had been laid before the people of California as an explicit policy, with the invitation to vote him out of office if they did not like it. But they did. Like a lot of California politicians who had jumped onto the national stage, his support at home was strong. High negatives, sure, but high positives, with the positives out-running the negatives by about two-to-one. Now that he was President, the numbers had only polarized more, in the usual way ofAmerican politics, everyone hooked on the soap opera of cheering for or against personalities.
So a checkered past was a huge advantage in creating the spectacle. In his particular version of the clichéd list, Phil had been a reporter for the LA Times, a surfboard wax manufacturer (which business had bankrolled the start of his political career), a VA social worker, a college lecturer in history, a sandal maker, and a apprentice to a stone mason. From that job he had run for congress from Marin County, and won the seat as an outsider Democrat. This was a difficult thing to do. The Democratic party hated outsiders to join the party and win high office at the first try; they wanted everyone to start at the bottom of the ladder and work their way up until thoroughly brainwashed and obliged.
Worse yet, Phil had then jumped into a weak Senatorial race, and ridden the state’s solid Democratic majority into the Senate, even though the party was still offended and not behind him.
Soon after that, his wife of twenty-three years, his high school sweetheart, who had served in Vietnam as a nurse to be closer to him after he was drafted, died in a car crash. It was after that that Phil had started his globe-trotting, turning into the World’s Senator. Because he kept his distance from D.C. through all those years, no one in the capital knew much about his personal life. What they knew was what he gave them. From his account it was all travel, golf, and meetings with foreign politicians, often the environmental ministers, often in central Asia. ‘I like the Stans,’ he would say.
In his frequent returns to California, he was much the same. For a while he pursued his ‘Ongoing Work Education program,’ Project OWE, because he owed it to his constituents to learn what their lives were like. Pronounced ow, however, by his staff, because of the injuries he incurred while taking on various jobs around the state for a month or three, workingat them while continuing to function as senator in D.C., which irritated his colleagues no end. In that phase, he had worked as a grocery store bagger and check-out clerk, construction worker, real estate agent, plumber (or plumber’s helper as he joked), barrio textile seamstress, sewage maintenance worker, trash collector, stockbroker, and a celebrated stint as a panhandler in San Francisco, during which time he had slept at undisclosed locations in Golden Gate Park and elsewhere around the city, and asked for spare change for his political fund – part of his ‘spare change’ effort in which he had also asked Californian citizens to send in all the coins accumulating on their dressers, a startlingly successful plan that had weighed tons and netted him close to a million dollars, entirely funding his second run for senator, which he did on the cheap and mostly over the internet.
He had also walked from San Francisco to Los Angeles, climbed the Seven Summits (voting on the clean air bill from the top of Mt. Everest), swum from Catalina to the southern California mainland, and across Chesapeake Bay, and hiked the Appalachian trail from end to end. (‘Very boring,’ was his judgment. ‘Next time the PCT.’)
All these activities were extraneous to his work in the Senate, and time-consuming, and for his first two terms he was considered within the Beltway to be a celebrity freak, a party trick of a politician and a lightweight in the real world of power (i.e. money) no matter how far he could walk or swim. But even in that period his legislation had been interesting in concept (his contribution) and solidly written (his staff’s contribution), and cleverly pursued and promoted by all, with much more of it being enacted into law than was usual in the Senate. This was not noted by the press, always on the look-out for bad news and ephemera, but by his third term it began to become evident to insiders that he had been playing the insider game all along, and only pretending to be an outsider, so that his committee appointments were strong,and his alliances within the Democratic party apparatus finally strong, and across the aisle with moderate Republicans and McCain and other Vietnam vets, even stronger. He also had done a good job making his enemies, taking on flamboyantly bad senators like Winston and Reynolds and Hoof-in-mouth, whose subsequent falls from grace on corruption charges or simply failed policies had then retroactively confirmed his early judgments that these people were not just political dunderheads but also dangerous to the republic.
So ultimately, when the time came, everything he had done for twenty years and more turned out to have been as it were designed to prepare him not only for his successful run for the Presidency, but for his subsequent occupancy as well, a crucial point and something that many previous candidates obviously forgot. The world travel, the global network of allies and friends, the OWE program, the legislation he had introduced and gotten passed, his committee work – it all fit a pattern, as if he had had the plan from the start.
Which he totally denied; and his staff believed him. They thought in their gossip among themselves that they had seen him come to his decision to run just a year before the campaign (at about the same time, Charlie thought but never said aloud, that he had met for twenty minutes with the Khembali leaders). Whether he had harbored thoughts all along, no one really knew. No one could read his mind, and he had no close associates. Widowed; kids grown; friends kept private and out of town: to Washington he seemed as lonely and impenetrable as Reagan, or FDR, or Lincoln – all friendly and charming people, but distant in some basic way.
In any case he was in, and ready and willing to use the office as strong presidents do – not only as the executive branch of government, whipping on the other two to get things done, but also as a bully pulpit from which to address the citizens of the country and the rest of the world. His highpositive/high negative pattern continued and intensified, with the debate over him in the States more polarized than ever, at least in the media. But in the world at large, his positives were higher than any American president’s since Kennedy. And interest was very high. All waited and watched through the few weeks left until his inauguration; there was a sudden feeling of stillness in the world, as if the pendulum swinging them all together helplessly this way and that had reached a height, and paused in space, just before falling the other way. People began to think that something might really happen.
It seemed to Frank that with such a president as Phil Chase coming into office, in theory it ought to be very interesting to be the presidential science advisor, or an advisor to the advisor. But there were aspects of the new job that were disturbing as well. It was going to mean increasing the distance between himself and the doing of science proper, and was therefore going to move him away from what he was good at. But that was what it meant to be moving into administration. Was there anyone who did policy well?
His intrusion on the Khembalis was another problem. Rudra’s failing health was a problem. His own injury, and the uncertain mentation that had resulted (if it had), was a very central problem – perhaps the problem. Leaving NSF, meaning Anna and the rest of his acquaintances and routines there (except for Edgardo and Kenzo, who were also joining Diane’s team) was a problem.
Problems required solutions, and solutions required decisions. And he couldn’t decide. So the days were proving difficult.
Because above and beyond all the rest of his problems, there was the absolutely immediate one: he had to – had to – had to – warn Caroline that her cover was insufficient to keep even a newcomer on the scene like Edgardo’s friend from locating her. He had to warn her of this! But he did not know where she was. She might be on that island in Maine, but unless he went and looked he couldn’t know. But if he went, he could not do anything that might expose her (and him too) to her husband. His van was chipped with a GPS transponder – Caroline was the one who had told him about it – so its identity and location could be under surveillance, and tracked wherever it went. He could easily imagine a program that would flag any time his van left the metropolitan area. This was a serious disadvantage, because his van was his shelter of last resort, his only mobile bedroom, and all in all, the most versatile room in the disassembled and modular home that he had cast through the fabric of the city.
‘Can I de-chip my van?’ he asked Edgardo next day on their run, after wanding them both again. ‘For certain? And, you know, as if by accident or malfunction?’
‘I should think so,’ Edgardo replied. ‘It might be something you would need some help with. Let me look into it.’
‘Okay, but I want to go soon.’
‘Up to Maine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, I’ll do my best. The person I want to talk to is not exactly on call. I have to meet them in a context like this one.’
But that night, as Frank was settling down in the garden shed with Rudra, who was already asleep, Qang came out to tell him there was a man there to see him. This caused Frank’s pulse to elevate to a disturbing degree –
But it was Edgardo, and a short man, who said ‘hello’ and after that spoke only to Edgardo, in Spanish. ‘Umberto here is another porteño,’ Edgardo said. ‘He helps me with matters such as this.’
Umberto rolled his eyes dramatically. He took Frank’s keys and went at the van as if he owned it, banging around, pulling up carpet from the floor, running various diagnostics through a laptop, complaining to Edgardo all the while. Eventually he opened the hood and after rooting around for a while, unbolted a small box from the crowded left engine wall. When he was done he gave the box to Frank and walked off into the dark, still berating Edgardo over his shoulder.
‘Thanks!’ Frank called after him. Then to Edgardo: ‘Did I see how he did that, so I can put it back in?’ He peered at the engine wall, then the bolts in his hand there with the box, then the holes the bolts had come out of. It looked like a wrench kit would do it. ‘Okay, but where do I put it now?’
‘You must leave it right here where it would be, so that it seems your van is parked here. Then replace it when you return.’
‘Out here on the street?’
‘Isn’t there a driveway to this house?’
‘Yeah, I can leave it there I guess. Buried in this gravel here.’
‘There you go.’
‘And other than that, I’m clean?’
‘That’s what Umberto said. Speaking only of the van, of course.’
‘Yeah. I’ve got the wand for my stuff. But is that enough? The van won’t look weird to toll gates for not having the box, or anything like that?’
‘No. Not every vehicle has these things yet. So far, the total information society is not yet fully online. When it is, you won’t be able to do stuff like this. You’ll never be able to get off the grid, and if you did it would look so strange it would be worse than being on the grid. Everything will have to be rethought.’
‘Jesus.’ Frank grimaced. ‘Well, by then I won’t be involved in this kind of stuff. Listen, I think I’m going to take off now and get a few hours of driving in. It’ll take me all of tomorrow to get there as it is.’
‘That’s true. Good luck my friend. Remember – no cell phone calls, no ATMs, no credit cards. Do you have enough cash with you?’
‘I hope so,’ feeling the thickness of his wallet.
‘You shouldn’t stay away too long anyway.’
‘No. I guess I’m okay, then. Thanks for the help.’
‘Good luck. Don’t call.’
Grumpily Frank got in his van and drove north on 95. Transponders embedded in every vehicle’s windshields … except would that really happen? Was this total information project not perhaps crazy enough to fail, ultimately? Or – could it be stopped? Could they go to Phil Chase and lay out the whole story, and get him to root out Caroline’s ex and his whole operation, whatever it was? Root it out from the top down? Were the spy agencies so imbricated into the fabric of the government (and the military) that they were beyond presidential control, or even presidential knowledge? Or inquiry?
If it weren’t for his going-off-grid status, he would have called up Edgardo to ask his opinion on this. As it was he could only continue to think, and worry, and drive.
Somewhere in New Jersey it occurred to him that as he was on the road north, he must therefore have decided to go. He had decided something! And without even trying. Maybe decisions now had to occur without one really noticing them happening, or wondering how. It was so hard to say. In this particular case, he really had had no choice; he had to warn her. So it had been more of a life override than a decision. Maybe one went through life doing the things one had to do, hooped by necessity, with decisions reserved for options and therefore not really a major factor in one’s life. A bad thought or a good one? He couldn’t tell.
A bad thought, he decided in the end. A bad thought in a long night of bad thoughts, as it turned out. Long past midnight he kept following the taillights ahead of him, and the traffic slowly thinned and became mostly trucks of various kinds. Over the Susquehanna, over the Hudson, otherwise tunneling on endlessly through the forest.
Finally he felt in danger of falling asleep at the wheel, got off and found a side road and a little parking lot, empty and dark and anonymous, where he felt comfortable parking under a tree and locking the doors and crawling into the back of the van to catch a few hours’ sleep.
Dawn’s light woke him and he drove on, north through New England, fueled by the worst 7–11 coffee he had ever tasted – coffee so bad it was good, in terms of waking him up. The idea that it might be poisoned gave him an extra jolt. Surely someone had poured in their battery acid as a prank. There was too much time to think. If Caroline was the boss, and her ex worked for her, then …
95 kept on coming, an endless slot through endless forest, a grass sward and two concrete strips rolling on for mile after mile. Finally he came to Bangor, Maine, and turned right, driving over hills and across small rivers, then through the standard array of franchises in Ellsworth, including an immense Wal-Mart. During the night he had driven north into full winter; a thin blanket of dirty snow covered everything. He passed a completely shut-down tourist zone, the motels, lobster shacks, antique stores, and miniature golf courses all looking miserable under their load of ice and snow, all except the Christmas knick-knack barn, which had a full parking lot and was bustling with festive shoppers.
Soon after that he crossed the bridge that spanned the tidal race to Mount Desert Island. By then the round gray tops of the island’s little range of peaks had appeared several times over the water of Frenchman’s Bay. They were lower than Frank had expected them to be, but still, they were bare rock mountain tops, shaved into graceful curves by the immense force of the Ice Age’s ice cap. Frank had googled the island on a cyber café’s rented computer, and had read quite a bit; and the information had surprised him in more ways than one. It turned out that this little island was in many ways the place where the American wilderness movement had begun, in the form of the landscape painter Frederick Church, who had come here in the 1840s to paint. In getting around the island, Church had invented what he called ‘rusticating,’ by which he meant wandering on mountainsides just for the fun of it. He also took offense at the clear-cut logging on the island, and worked to get the legislation of Maine to forbid it, in some of the nation’s first environmental legislature. All this was happening at the same time Emerson and Thoreau were writing. Something had been in the air.
Eventually all that led to the national park system, and Mount Desert Island had been the third one, the first east of the Mississippi, and the only one anywhere created by citizens donating their own land. Acadia National Park now took up about two-thirds of the island, in a patchwork pattern; when Frank drove over the bridge he was on private land, but most of the seaward part of the island belonged to the park.
He slowed down, deep in forest still, following instructions printed out from a map website. The Maine coast here faced almost south. The island was roughly square, and split nearly in half, east and west, by a fjord called Somes Sound. Caroline’s friend’s house was on the western half of the island.
Nervously Frank drove through Somesville, at the head of the sound. This turned out to be no more than a scattering of white houses, on snowy lawns on either side of the road. He looked for something like a village commercial center but did not find one.
Now he was getting quite nervous. Just the idea of seeing her. He didn’t know how to approach her. In his uncertainty he drove past the right turn that headed to her friend’s place, and continued on to a town called Southwest Harbor. He wanted to eat something, also to think things over.
In the only cafe still open he ordered a sandwich and espresso. He didn’t want to catch her unawares; that could be a bad shock. On the other hand there didn’t seem any other way to do it. Sitting in the cafe drinking espresso (heavenly after the battery acid), he ate his sandwich and tried to think. They were the same thoughts he had been thinking the whole drive. He would have to surprise her; hopefully he could immediately explain why he was there – the possible danger she was in – so that she did not jump to the conclusion that he was somehow stalking her. They could talk; he could see what she wanted to do, perhaps even help her move somewhere else, if that’s what she wanted. Although in that case …
Well, but he had run through all these thoughts a thousand times during the drive. All the scenarios led to a break point beyond which it was hard to imagine. He had to go to work on Monday. Or he should. And so …
He finished his lunch and walked around a little. Southwest Harbor’s harbor was a small bay surrounded by forested hills, and filled with working boats and working docks, also a small Coast Guard station out on the point to the left. It was quiet, icy, empty of people; picturesque, but in a good way. A working harbor.
He would have to risk dropping in on her. The wand said he was clean. Edgardo’s friend had said his van was clean. He had driven all night, he was five miles away from her. Surely the decision had already been made!
So he got back in his van, and drove back up the road to the Somesville fire station, where he took a left and followed a winding road through bare trees. Past an iced-over pond on the right, then another one on the left, this one a lake that was narrow and long, extending south for miles, a white flatness at the bottom of a classic U-shaped glacial slot. Pond’s End. Soon after that, a left turn onto a gravel road.
He drove slower than ever, under a dense network of overarching branches. Houses to the left were fronting the long frozen lake. Caroline’s friend’s place was on the right, where it would overlook a second arm of the lake. The map showed a Y-shaped lake, with the long arm straight, and the other shorter arm curving into it about halfway down.
Her friend’s house had no number in its driveway, but by the numbers before and after it, he deduced that it had to be the one. He turned around in a driveway, idled back up the road.
The place had a short gravel curve of driveway, with no cars in it. At the end of the driveway to the left stood a house, while to the right was a detached garage. Both were dark green with white trim. A car could have been hidden in the garage. Ah; the house number was there on the side of the garage.
He didn’t want to drive into the driveway. On the other hand it must look odd, him idling out on the road, looking in – if there was anyone there to see. He idled down the road farther, back in the direction of the paved road. Then he parked on the side at a wide spot, cursing under his breath. He got out and walked quickly down the road and up the driveway to the house in question.
He stopped between the house and the garage, under a big bare-limbed tree. The snow was crushed down to ice shards on the flagstones between the house and garage, as if someone had walked all over them and then there had been a thaw. No one was visible through the kitchen window. He was afraid to knock on the kitchen door. He stepped around the side of the house, looking in the windows running down that side. Inside was a big room, beyond it a sun porch facing the lake. The lake was down a slope from the house. There was a narrow path down, flanked by stone-walled terraces filled with snow and black weeds. Down on the water at the bottom of the path was a little white dock, anchored by a tiny white boathouse.
The door of the boathouse swung open from inside.
‘Caroline?’ Frank called down.
Silence. Then: ‘Frank?’
She peeked around the edge of the little boathouse, looking up for him with just the startled unhappy expression he had feared he would cause –
Then she almost ran up the path. ‘Frank, what is it?’ she exclaimed as she hurried up. ‘What are you doing here?’
He found he was already halfway down the path. They met between two blueberry bushes, him with a hand up as if in warning, but she crashed through that and embraced him – held him – hugged him. They clung to each other.
Frank had not allowed himself to think of this part (but he had anyway): what it meant to hold her. How much he had wanted to see her.
She pushed back from him, looking past him up to the house. ‘Why are you here? What’s going on? How did you find me?’
‘I needed to warn you about that,’ Frank said. ‘At least I thought I should. My friend at NSF, the one who helped me with the election disk you gave us? He has a friend who was looking into who your ex is, and what he’s doing now, you know, because they wanted to follow up on the election thing. So he wanted to talk to you about that, and my friend told him that you had disappeared, and this guy said that he knew where you probably were.’
‘Oh my God.’ Her hand flew to her mouth. Another body response common to all. She peered around him again up the driveway.
‘So, I wanted to see if he was right,’ Frank continued, ‘and I wanted to warn you if he was. And I wanted to see you, anyway.’
‘Yes.’ They held hands, then hugged again. Squeezed hard. Frank felt the fear and isolation in her.
‘So.’ He pulled back and looked at her. ‘Maybe you should move.’
‘Yeah. I guess so. Possibly. But – well, first tell me everything you can. Especially about how this person found me. Here, come on up. Let’s get inside.’ She led him by the hand, back up the garden path to the house.
She entered it by way of the sun porch door. The sun porch was separated from the living room by diamond-paned windows above a wainscoting. An old vacation home, Frank saw, hand made, scrupulously clean, with old furniture, and paintings on every wall that appeared to be the work of a single enthusiast. The view of the lake seemed the main attraction to Frank.
Caroline gestured around her. ‘I first visited my friend Mary here when we were six.’
‘Man.’
‘But we haven’t been in touch for years, and Ed never knew about her. I never told him. In fact, I can’t quite imagine how your friend’s friend tracked down the association.’
‘He said you called a number of an old roommate, and this was her place.’
She frowned. ‘That’s true.’
‘So, that’s how he tracked this place down. And if he could, so could your ex, presumably. And besides,’ he added sharply, surprising them both, ‘why did you tell me that he was your boss?’
