Fifty Degrees Below

‘That’s right. But I went to a lecture, like I told you.’

‘That’s right, you did. Well, I didn’t know that when I saw you in the Metro. And there you were, looking upset, and so – I thought you might be trailing me. I thought you had found out somehow, done some kind of back trace – that’s another area I’ve been working on, mirror searching. I figured you had decided to confront me, to find out what was going on. It seemed possible, anyway. Although it was also possible it was just one of those freak things that happen in D.C. I mean, you do run into people here.’

‘But then I followed you.’ Frank laughed briefly.

‘Right, you did, and I was standing there waiting for that elevator, thinking: What is this guy going to do to me?’ She laughed nervously, remembering it.

‘You didn’t show it.’

‘No? I bet I did. You didn’t know me. Anyway, then the elevator stuck –’

‘You didn’t stop it somehow?’

‘Heck no, how would I do that? I’m not some kind of a …’

‘James Bond? James Bondette?’

She laughed. ‘It is not like that. It’s just surveillance. Anyway there we were, and we started talking, and it didn’t take long for me to see that you didn’t know who I was, that you didn’t know about being monitored. It was just a coincidence.’

‘But you said you knew I had followed you.’

‘That’s right. I mean, it seemed like you had. But since you didn’t know what I was doing, then it had to be, I don’t know …’

‘Because I liked the way you looked.’

She nodded.

‘Well, it’s true,’ Frank said. ‘Sue me.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘It’s okay. I mean, I liked that. I’m in a kind of a bad … Well anyway, I liked it. And I already liked you, see? I wasn’t monitoring you very closely, but closely enough so that I knew some things about you. I – I had to monitor some of your calls. And I thought you were funny.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. You are funny. At least I think so. Anyway, I’m sorry. I’ve never really had to think about what I do, not like this, not in terms of a person I talk to. I mean – how horrible it must sound.’

‘You spy on people.’

‘Yes. It’s true. But I’ve never thought it has done anybody any harm. It’s a way of looking out for people. Anyway, in this particular case, it meant that I knew you already. I liked you already. And there you were, so, you know … it meant you liked me too.’ She smiled crookedly. ‘That was okay too. Guys don’t usually follow me around.’

‘Yeah right.’

‘They don’t.’

‘Uh huhn. The man who knew too little, watched by the spy who knew even less.’

She laughed, pulled her hand away, punched him lightly on the arm. He caught her hand in his, pulled her to him. She leaned into his chest and he kissed the top of her head, as if to say, I forgive you your job, I forgive the surveillance. He breathed in the scent of her hair. Then she looked up, and they kissed, very briefly; then she pulled away. The shock of it passed through him, waking him up and making him happy. He remembered how it had been in the elevator; this wasn’t like that, but he could tell she remembered it too.

‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Then we did that. You’re a handsome man. And I had figured out why you had followed me, and I felt – oh, I don’t know. I liked you.’

‘Yes,’ Frank said, still remembering the elevator. Feeling the kiss. His skin was glowing.

She laughed again, looking off at her memories. ‘I worried afterward that you would think I was some kind of a loose woman, jumping you like I did. But at the time I just went for it.’

‘Yes you did,’ Frank said.

They laughed, then kissed again.

When they stopped she smiled to herself, pushed her hair off her forehead. ‘My,’ she murmured.

Frank tried to track one of the many thoughts skittering back into his head. ‘You said you were in a kind of a bad?’

‘Ah. Yes. I did.’

The corners of her mouth tightened. She pulled back a bit. Suddenly Frank saw that she was unhappy; and this was so unlike the impression he had gained of her in the elevator that he was shocked. He saw he did not know her, of course he did not know her. He had been thinking that he did, but it wasn’t so. She was a stranger.

‘What?’ he said.

‘I’m married.’

‘Ahh.’

‘And, you know. It’s bad.’

‘Uh oh.’ But that was also good, he thought.

‘I … don’t really want to talk about it. Please. But there it is. That’s where I’m at.’

‘Okay. But … you’re out here.’

‘I’m staying with friends tonight. They live nearby. As far as anyone knows, I’m sleeping on their couch. I left a note in case they get up, saying I couldn’t sleep and went out for a run. But they won’t get up. Or even if they do, they won’t check on me.’

‘Does your husband do surveillance too?’

‘Oh yeah. He’s much further up than I am.’

‘I see.’

Frank didn’t know what to say. It was bad news. The worst news of the night, worse than the fact that he was under surveillance. On the other hand, there she was beside him, and they had kissed.

‘Please.’ She put a hand to his mouth, and he kissed her fingertips. He tried to swallow all his questions.

But some of these questions represented a change of subject, a move to safer ground. ‘So – tell me what you mean exactly when you say surveillance? What do you do?’

‘There are different levels. For you, it’s almost all documentary. Credit cards, phone bills, e-mail, computer files.’

‘Whoah.’

‘Well, hey. Think about it. Physical location too, sometimes. Although mostly that’s at the cell phone records level. That isn’t very precise. I mean, I know you’re staying over off of Connecticut somewhere, but you don’t have an address listed right now. So, maybe staying with someone else. That kind of stuff is obvious. If they wanted to, they could chip you. And your new van has a transponder, it’s GPS-able.’

‘Shit.’

‘Everyone’s is. Like transponders in airplanes. It’s just a question of getting the code and locking on.’

‘My Lord.’

Frank thought it over. There was so much information out there. If someone had access to it, they could find out a tremendous amount. ‘Does NSF know this kind of stuff is going on with their people?’

‘No. This is a black-black.’

‘And your husband, he does what?’

‘He’s at a higher level.’

‘Uh oh.’

‘Yeah. But look, I don’t want to talk about that now. Some other time.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know. Some other time.’

‘When we meet again?’

She smiled wanly. ‘Yes. When we meet again. Right now,’ lighting up her watch and peering at it, ‘shit. I have to get back. My friends will be getting up soon. They go to work early.’

‘Okay … You’ll be okay?’

‘Oh yeah. Sure.’

‘And you’ll call me again?’

‘Yes. I’ll need to pick my times. I need to have a clear space, and be able to call you from a clean phone. There’s some protocols we can establish. We’ll talk about it. We’ll set things up. But now I’ve gotta go.’

‘Okay.’

A peck of a kiss and she was off into the night.

He drove his van back to the edge of Rock Creek Park, sat in the driver’s seat thinking. There was still an hour before dawn. For about half an hour it rained. The sound on the van’s roof was like a steel drum with only two notes, both hit all the time.

Caroline. Married but unhappy. She had called him, she had kissed him. She knew him, in some sense; which was to say, she had him under surveillance. Some kind of security program based on the virtual wagers of some MIT computers, for Christ’s sake. Perhaps that was not as bad as it first sounded. A pro forma exercise. As compared to a bad marriage. Sneaking out at three in the morning. It was hard to know what to feel.

With the first grays of dawn the rain stopped, and he got out and walked into the park. Bird calls of various kinds: cheeps, trills; then a night thrush, its little melodies so outrageous that at first they seemed beyond music, they were to human music as dreams were to art – stranger, bolder, wilder. Birds singing in the forest at dawn, singing, The rain has stopped! The day is here! I am here! I love you! I am singing!

It was still pretty dark, and when he came to the gorge overlook he pulled a little infrared scope he had bought out of his pocket, and had a look downstream to the waterhole. Big red bodies, shimmering in the blackness; they looked like some of the bigger antelopes to Frank, maybe the elands. Those might bring the jaguar out. A South American predator attacking African prey, as if the Atlantic had collapsed back to this narrow ravine and they were all in Gondwanaland together. Far in the distance he could hear the siamangs’ dawn chorus, he assumed; they sounded very far away. Suddenly something inside his chest ballooned like a throat pouch, puffed with happiness, and to himself (to Caroline) he whispered, ‘ooooooooop! oooooooop!’

He listened to the siamangs, and sang under his breath with them, and fitted his digital camera to the night scope to take some IR photos of the drinking animals for FOG. In the growing light he could see them now without the scope. Black on gray. He wondered if the same siamang or gibbon made the first call every morning. He wondered if its companions were lying on branches in comfort, annoyed to be awakened; or if sleeping in the branches was uncomfortable, and all of them thus ready and waiting to get up and move with the day. Maybe this differed with animal, or circumstance – as with people – so that sometimes they snoozed through those last precious moments, before the noise became so raucously operatic that no one could sleep through it. Even at a distance it was a thrilling sound; and now it was the song of meeting Caroline, and he quit trying not to spook the big ungulents at the waterhole and howled. ‘OOOOOOOOP! OoooooooooOOOOOOOOP OOP! OOP!’

He felt flooded. He had never felt like this before, it was some new emotion, intense and wild. No excess of reason for him, not any more! What would the guru say about this? Did the old man ever feel like this? Was this love, then, and him encountering it for the first time, not ever knowing before what it was? It was true she was married. But there were worse entanglements. It didn’t sound like it was going to last. He could be patient. He would wait out the situation. He would have to wait for another call, after all.

Then he saw one of the gibbons or siamangs, across the ravine and upstream, swinging through branches. A small black shape, like a big cat but with very long arms. The classic monkey shape. He caught sight of white cheeks and knew that it was one of the gibbons. White-cheeked gibbons. The whoops had sounded miles away, but they might have been closer all along. In the forest it was hard to judge.

There were more of them, following the first. They flew through the trees like crazy trapeze artists, improvising every swing. Brachiation: amazing. Frank photographed them too, hoping the shots might help the FOG people get an ID. Brachiating through the trees, no plan or destination, just free-forming it through the branches. He wished he could join them and fly like Tarzan, but watching them he knew just what an impossible fantasy that was. Hominids had come down out of the trees, they were no longer arboreal. Tarzan was wrong, and even his treehouse was a throwback.

Upstream the three eland looked up at the disturbance, then continued to drink their fill. Frank stood on the overlook, happily singing his rising glissando of animal joy, ‘oooooooooop!’

And speaking of animals, there was a party at the re-opened National Zoo, scheduled for later that very morning.

The National Zoo, perched as it was on a promontory overlooking a bend in the Rock Creek gorge, had been hammered by the great flood. Lipping over from the north, the surge had rushed down to meet the rise of the Potomac, and the scouring had torn a lot of the fencing and landscaping away. Fortunately most of the buildings and enclosures were made of heavy concrete, and where their foundations had not been undercut, they had survived intact. The National Park system had been able to fund the repairs internally, and given that most of the released animals had survived the flood, and been rounded up afterward rather easily (indeed some had returned to the zoo site as soon as the water subsided), repairs had proceeded with great dispatch. The Friends of the National Zoo, numbering nearly two thousand now, had pitched in with their labor and their collective memory of the park, and the reconstructed version now opening to the public looked very like the original, except for a certain odd rawness.

The tiger and lion enclosure, at the southern end of the park, was a circular island divided into four quadrants, separated by a moat and a high outer wall from the human observers. The trees on the island had survived, although they looked strangely sparse and bedraggled for June.

On this special morning the returning crowd was joined by the Khembali legation, on hand to repeat their swimming tigers’ welcoming ceremony, so ironically interrupted by the flood. The Quiblers were there too, of course; one of the tigers had spent two nights in their basement, and now they felt a certain familial interest.

Anna enjoyed watching Joe as he stood in his backpack on Charlie’s back, happy to be up where he could see properly, whacking Charlie on the sides of the head and shouting ‘Tiger? Tiger?’

‘Yes, tiger,’ Charlie agreed, trying blindly to catch the little fists pummeling him. ‘Our tigers! Swimming tigers!’

A dense crowd surrounded them, ooohing together when the door to the tigers’ inner sanctum opened, and a few moments later the big cats strode out, glorious in the morning sun.

‘Tiger! Tiger!’

The crowd cheered. The tigers ignored the commotion. They padded around on the washed grass, sniffing things. One marked the big tree in their quadrant, protected from claws if not from pee by a new wooden cladding, and the crowd said ‘Ah.’ Nick explained to the people around him that these were Bengal tigers that had been washed out to sea in a big flood of the Brahmaputra, not the Ganges; that they had survived by swimming together for an unknown period of time, and that the Brahmaputra’s name changed to the Tsangpo after a dramatic bend upstream. Anna asked if the Ganges too hadn’t been flooding at least a little bit. Joe jumped up and down in his backpack, nearly toppling forward over Charlie’s head. Charlie listened to Nick, as did Frank Vanderwal, standing behind them among the Khembalis.

Rudra Cakrin gave a small speech, translated by Drepung, thanking the zoo and all its people, and then the Quiblers.

‘Tiger tiger tiger!’

Frank grinned to see Joe’s excitement. ‘Ooooop!’ he cried, imitating the gibbons, which excited Joe even more. It seemed to Anna that Frank was in an unusually good mood. Some of the FONZies came by and gave him a big round button that said FOG on it, and he took another one from them and pinned it to Nick’s shirt. Nick asked the volunteers a barrage of questions about the zoo animals still on the loose, at the same time eagerly perusing the FOG brochure they gave him. ‘Have any animals gotten as far as Bethesda?’

Frank replied for the FONZies, allowing them to move on in their rounds. ‘They’re finding smaller ones all over. They seem to be radiating out the tributary streams from Rock Creek. You can check the website and get all the latest sightings, and track the radio signals from the ones that have been tagged. When you join FOG, you can call in GPS locations for any ferals that you see.’

‘Cool! Can we go and look for some?’

‘I hope so,’ Frank said. ‘That would be fun.’ He looked over at Anna and she nodded, feeling pleased. ‘We could make an expedition of it.’

‘Is Rock Creek Park open yet?’

‘It is if you’re in the FOG.’

‘Is it safe?’ Anna asked.

‘Sure. I mean there are parts of the gorge where the new walls are still unstable, but we would stay away from those. There’s an overlook where you can see the torn-up part and the new pond where a lot of them drink.’

‘Cool!’

The larger of the swimming tigers slouched down to the moat and tested the water with his huge paw.

‘Tiger tiger tiger!’

The tiger looked up. He eyed Joe, tilted back his massive head, roared briefly at what had to be the lowest frequencies audible to humans, or even lower. It was a sound mostly felt in the stomach.

‘Ooooooh,’ Joe said. The crowd said the same.

Frank was grinning with what Anna now thought of as his true smile. ‘Now that’s a vocalization,’ he said.

Rudra Chakrin spoke for a while in Tibetan, and Drepung then translated.

‘The tiger is a sacred animal, of course. He stands for courage. When we are at home, his name is not to be said aloud; that would be bad luck. Instead he is called King of the Mountain, or the Big Insect.’

‘The Big Insect?’ Nick repeated incredulously. ‘That’d just make him mad!’

The larger tiger, a male, padded over to the tree and raked the new cladding, leaving a clean set of claw marks on the fresh wood. The crowd ooohed again.

Frank hooted. ‘Hey, I’m going to go see if I can set the gibbons off. Nick, do you want to join me?’

‘To do what?’

‘I want to try to get the gibbons to sing. I know they’ve recaptured one or two.’

‘Oh, no thanks. I think I’ll stay here and keep watching the tigers.’

‘Sure. You’ll be able to hear the gibbons from here, if they do it.’

Eventually the tigers flopped down in the morning shade and stared into space. The zoo people made speeches as the crowd dispersed through the rest of the zoo. Some pretty vigorous whooping from the direction of the gibbons’ enclosure nevertheless did not sound quite like the creatures themselves. After a while Frank rejoined them, shaking his head. ‘There’s only one gibbon couple that’s been recovered. The rest are out in the park. I’ve seen some of them. It’s neat,’ he told Nick. ‘You’ll like it.’

Drepung came over. ‘Would you join our little party in the visitors’ center?’ he asked Frank.

‘Sure, thanks. My pleasure.’

They walked up the zoo paths together to a building near the entry on Connecticut. Drepung led the Quiblers and Frank to a room in back, and Rudra Cakrin guided them to seats around a round table under a window. He came over and shook Frank’s hand: ‘Hello, Frank. Welcome. Please to meet you. Please to sit. Eat some food, drink some tea.’

Frank looked startled. ‘So you do speak English!’

The old man smiled. ‘Oh yes, very good English. Drepung make me take lessons.’

Drepung rolled his eyes and shook his head. Padma and Sucandra joined them as they passed out sample cups of Tibetan tea. The cross-eyed expression on Nick’s face when he smelled his cup gave Drepung a good laugh. ‘You don’t have to try it,’ he assured the boy.

‘It’s like each ingredient has gone bad in a completely different way,’ Frank commented after a taste.

‘Bad to begin with,’ Drepung said.

‘Good!’ Rudra exclaimed. ‘Good stuff.’

He hunched forward to slurp at his cup. He did not much resemble the commanding figure who had given the lecture at NSF, Anna thought, which perhaps explained why Frank was regarding him so curiously.

‘So you’ve been taking English lessons?’ Frank said. ‘Or maybe it’s like Charlie said? That you spoke English all along, but didn’t want to tell us?’

‘Charlie say that?’

‘I was just joking,’ Charlie said.

‘Charlie very funny.’

‘Yes … so you are taking lessons?’

‘I am scientist. Study English like a bug.’

‘A scientist!’

‘I am always scientist.’

‘Me too. But I thought you said, at your lecture, that rationality wasn’t enough. That an excess of reason was a form of madness.’

Rudra consulted with Drepung, then said, ‘Science is more than reason. More stronger.’ He elbowed Drepung, who elaborated:

‘Rudra Cakrin uses a word for science that is something like devotion. A kind of devotion, he says. A way to honor, or worship.’

‘Worship what, though?’

Drepung asked Rudra, got a reply. ‘Whatever you find,’ he said. ‘Devotion is a better word than worship, maybe.’

Rudra shook his head, looking frustrated by the limited palette of the English language. ‘You watch,’ he said in his gravelly voice, fixing Frank with a glare. ‘Look. If you can. Seems like healing.’

He appealed again to Drepung. A quick exchange in Tibetan, then he forged on. ‘Look and heal, yes. Make better. Make worse, make better. For example, take a walk. Look in. In, out, around, down, up. Up and down. Over and under. Ha ha ha.’

Drepung said, ‘Yes, his English lessons are coming right along.’

Sucandra and Padma laughed at this, and Rudra scowled a mock scowl, so unlike his real one.

‘He seldom sticks with one instructor for long,’ Padma said.

‘Goes through them like tissues,’ Sucandra amplified.

‘Oh my,’ Frank said.

The old man returned to his tea, then said to Frank, ‘You come to our home, please?’

‘Thank you, my pleasure. I hear it’s very close to NSF.’

Rudra shook his head, said something in Tibetan.

Drepung said, ‘By home, he means Khembalung. We are planning a short trip there, and the rimpoche thinks you should join us. He thinks it would be a big instruction for you.’

‘I’m sure it would,’ Frank said, looking startled. ‘And I’d like to see it. I appreciate him thinking of me. But I don’t know how it could work. I’m afraid I don’t have much time to spare these days.’

Drepung nodded. ‘True for all. The upcoming trip is planned to be short for this very reason. That is what makes it possible for the Quibler family also to join us.’

Again Frank looked surprised.

Drepung said, ‘Yes, they are all coming. We plan two days to fly there, four days on Khembalung, two days to get back. Eight days away. But a very interesting week, I assure you.’

‘Isn’t this monsoon season there?’

The Khembalis nodded solemnly. ‘But no monsoon, this year or two previous. Big drought. Another reason to see.’

Frank nodded, looked at Anna and Charlie: ‘So you’re really going?’

Anna said, ‘I thought it would be good for the boys. But I can’t be away from work for long.’

‘Or else her head will explode,’ Charlie said, raising a hand to deflect Anna’s elbow from his ribs. ‘Just joking! Anyway,’ addressing her, ‘you can work on the plane and I’ll watch Joe. I’ll watch him the whole way.’

‘Deal,’ Anna said swiftly.

‘Charlie very funny,’ Rudra said again.

Frank said, ‘Well, I’ll think it over. It sounds interesting. And I appreciate the invitation,’ nodding to Rudra.

‘Thank you,’ Rudra said.

Sucandra raised his glass. ‘To Khembalung!’

‘No!’ Joe cried.

THREE

Back To Khembalung

One Saturday Charlie was out on his own, Joe at home with Anna, Nick out with Frank tracking animals. After running some errands he browsed for a bit in Second Story Books, and he was replacing a volume on its shelf when a woman approached him and said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find William Blake?’

Surprised to be taken for an employee (they were all twenty-five and wore black), Charlie stared blankly at her.

‘He’s a poet,’ the woman explained.

Now Charlie was shocked; not only taken for a Second Story clerk, but for the kind who did not know who William Blake was?

‘Poetry’s back there,’ he finally got out, gesturing weakly toward the rear of the store.

The woman slipped past him, shaking her head.

Fire fire burning bright! Charlie didn’t say.