Green Earth

The doorbell rang. Anna went to it and opened it.

“Frank! Wow, you’re soaked.”

He must have been caught in the downpour that had begun about half an hour before, and was already finished. It was odd he hadn’t taken shelter during the worst of it. He looked like he had dived into a swimming pool with all his clothes on.

“Don’t worry,” she said as he hesitated on the porch, dripping like a statue in a fountain. “Here, you need a towel for your face.” She provided one from the vestibule’s coat closet. “The rain really got you.”

“Yeah.”

She was somewhat surprised to see him. She had thought he was uninterested in the Khembalis, even slightly dismissive of them. And he had sat through the afternoon’s lecture wearing one of his signature looks; he had a face able to express twenty minute gradations of displeasure, and the one at the lecture had been the one that said, “I’m keeping my eyes from rolling in my head only by the greatest of efforts.” Not the most pleasant of expressions on anyone’s face, and it had only gotten worse as the lecture went on, until eventually he had looked stunned and off in his own world.

On the other hand, he had gone to it. He had left in silence, obviously thinking something over. And now here he was.

So Anna was pleased. If the Khembalis could capture Frank’s interest, they should be able to do it with any scientist. Frank was the hardest case she knew.

Now he seemed slightly disoriented by his drenching. He was shaking his head ruefully.

Anna said, “Do you want to change into one of Charlie’s shirts?”

“No, I’ll be all right. I’ll steam dry.” Then he lifted his arms and looked down. “Well—maybe a shirt I guess. Will his fit me?”

“Sure, you’re only just a bit bigger than he is.”

She went upstairs to get one, calling down, “The others should be here any minute. There was flooding on Wisconsin, apparently, and some problems with the Metro.”

“I know about those, I got caught in one!”

“You’re kidding! What happened?” She came down with one of Charlie’s bigger T-shirts.

“The elevator I was in got stuck halfway up.”

“Oh no! For how long?”

“About half an hour I guess.”

“Jesus. That must have been spooky. Were you by yourself?”

“No, there was someone else, a woman. We got to talking, and so the time passed fast. It was interesting.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes. It was. Only I didn’t get her name, and then when we got out they had forms for us to fill out and, and she took off while I was doing mine, so I never caught what hers was. And then the guy from the Metro wouldn’t give it to me from her form, so now I’m kicking myself, because—well. I’d like to talk to her again.”

Anna inspected him, startled by this story. He was looking past her abstractedly, perhaps remembering the incident. He noticed her gaze and grinned, and this startled her once again, because it was a real smile. Always before Frank’s smile had been a skeptical thing, so ironic and knowing that only one side of his mouth tugged back. Now he was like a stroke victim who had recovered the use of the damaged side of his face.

It was a nice sight, and it had to have been because of this woman he had met. Anna felt a sudden surge of affection for him. They had worked together for quite some time, and that kind of collaboration can take two people into a realm of shared experience that is not like family or marriage but rather some other kind of bond that can be quite deep. A friendship formed in the world of thought. Maybe they were always that way. Anyway he looked happy, and she was happy to see it.

“This woman filled out a form, you say?”

“Yeah.”

“So you can find out.”

“They wouldn’t let me look at it.”

“No, but you’ll be able to get to it somehow.”

“You think so?”

Now she had his complete attention. “Sure. Get a reporter from the Post to help you, or an archival detective, or someone from the Metro. Or from Homeland Security for that matter. The fact you were in there with her, that might be the way to get it, I don’t know. But as long as it’s written down, something will work. That’s informatics, right?”

“True.” He smiled again, looking quite happy. Then he took Charlie’s shirt from her and walked around toward the kitchen while changing into it. He took a towel from her and toweled off his head. “Thanks. Here, can I put this in your dryer? Down in the basement, right?” He stepped over the baby gate, went downstairs. “Thanks Anna,” he called back up to her. “I feel better now.” When he came back up, the sound of the dryer on behind him, he smiled again. “A lot better.”

“You must have liked this woman!”

“I did. It’s true, I did. I can’t believe I didn’t get her name!”

“You will. Want a beer?”

“You bet I do.”

“In the door of the fridge. Oops, there’s the door again, here come the rest.”

Soon the Khembalis and many other friends and acquaintances from NSF filled the Quiblers’ little living room, and the dining room flanking it, and the kitchen beyond the dining room. Anna rushed back and forth, carrying drinks and trays of food. She enjoyed this, and was doing it more than usual to keep Charlie from inflaming his poison ivy. As she hurried around she enjoyed seeing Joe playing with Drepung, and Nick discussing Antarctic dinosaurs with Curt from the office right above hers; he was one of the U.S. Antarctic Program managers. That NSF also ran one of the continents of the world was something she tended to forget, but Curt had come to the talk, and liked it. “These Buddhist guys would go over big in McMurdo,” he told Nick. Meanwhile Charlie, skin devastated to a brown crust across wide regions of his neck and face, eyes brilliantly bloodshot with sleep deprivation and steroids, was absorbed in conversation with Sucandra. Then he noticed her running around and joined her in the kitchen to help. “I gave Frank one of your shirts,” she told him.

“I saw. He said he got soaked.”

“Yes. I think he was chasing around after a woman he met on the Metro.”

“What?”

She laughed. “I think it’s great. Go sit down, babe, don’t move your poor torso, you’ll make yourself itchy.”

“I’ve transcended itchiness. I’m only itchy for you.”

“Come on don’t. Go sit down.”

Only later in the evening did she see Frank again. He was sitting in the corner of the room, on the floor between the couch and the fireplace, quizzing Drepung about something or other. Drepung looked as if he was struggling to understand him. Anna was curious, and when she got a chance she sat down on the couch just above the two of them.

Frank nodded to her and then continued pressing a point, using one of his catchphrases: “But how does that work?”

“Well,” Drepung said, “I know what Rudra Cakrin says in Tibetan, obviously. His import is clear to me. Then I have to think what I know of English. The two languages are different, but so much is the same for all of us.”

“Deep grammar,” Frank suggested.

“Yes, but also just nouns. Names for things, names for actions, even for meanings. Equivalencies of one degree or another. So, I try to express my understanding of what Rudra said, but in English.”

“But how good is the correspondence?”

Drepung raised his eyebrows. “How can I know? I do the best I can.”

“You would need some kind of exterior test.”

Drepung nodded. “Have other Tibetan translators listen to the rimpoche, and then compare their English versions to mine. That would be very interesting.”

“Yes it would. Good idea.”

Drepung smiled at him. “Double-blind study, right?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Drepung intoned, reaching out for a cracker with which to dip hummus. “But I expect you would get a certain, what, range. Maybe you would not uncover many surprises with your study. Maybe just that I personally am a bad translator. Although I must say, I have a tough job. When I don’t understand the rimpoche, translating him gets harder.”

“So you make it up!” Frank laughed. His spirits were still high, Anna saw. “That’s what I’ve been saying all along.” He settled back against the side of the couch next to her.

But Drepung shook his head. “Not making things up. Re-creation, maybe.”

“Like DNA and phenotypes.”

“I don’t know.”

“A kind of code.”

“Well, but language is never just a code.”

“No. More like gene expression.”

“You must tell me.”

“From an instruction sequence, like a gene, to what the instruction creates. Language to thought. Or to meaning, or comprehension. Whatever! To some kind of living thought.”

Drepung grinned. “There are about fifty words in Tibetan that I would have to translate to the word thinking.”

“Like Eskimos with snow, if it’s true what they say about that.”

“Yes. Like Eskimos have snow, we Tibetans have thoughts.”

He laughed at the idea and Frank laughed too, shaken by that low giggle which was all he ever gave to laughter, but now emphatic and helpless with it, bubbling over with it. Anna could scarcely believe her eyes. He was as ebullient as if he were drunk, but he was still holding the same beer she had given him on his arrival. And she knew what he was high on anyway.

He pulled himself together, grew intent. “So today, when you said, ‘An excess of reason is itself a form of madness,’ what did your lama really say?”

“Just that. That’s easy, that’s an old proverb.” He said the sentence in Tibetan. “One word means ‘excess’ or ‘too much,’ you know, like that, and rig-gnas is reason, or science. Then zugs is ‘form,’ and zhe sdang is ‘madness,’ a version of hatred, from an older word that was like angry. One of the dug gsum, the Three Poisons of the Mind.”

“And the old man said that?”

“Yes. An old saying. Milarepa, I should think.”

“Was he talking about science, though?”

“The whole lecture was on science.”

“Yeah yeah. But I found that idea in particular pretty striking.”

“A good thought is one you can act on.”

“That’s what mathematicians say.”

“I’m sure.”

“So, was the lama saying that NSF is crazy? Or that Western science is crazy? Because it is pretty damned reasonable. I’m mean, that’s the point. That’s the method in a nutshell.”

“Well, I guess so. To that extent. We’re all crazy in some way or other, right? He did not mean to be critical. Nothing alive is ever quite in balance. It might be he was suggesting that science is out of balance. Feet without eyes.”

“I thought it was eyes without feet.”

Drepung waggled his hand: either way. “You should ask him.”

“But you’d be translating, so I might as well just ask you and cut out the middleman!”

“No,” laughing, “I am the middleman, I assure you.”

“But you can tell me what he would say,” teasing him now. “Cut right to the chase!”

“But he surprises me a lot.”

“Like when, give me an example.”

“Well. One time last week, he was saying to me …”

But at that point Anna was called away to the front door, and she did not get to hear Drepung’s example, but only Frank’s distinctive laughter, burbling under the clatter of conversation.

By the time she ran into Frank again he was out in the kitchen with Charlie and Sucandra, washing glasses and cleaning up. Charlie could only stand there and talk. He and Frank were discussing Great Falls, both recommending it to Sucandra. “It’s more like Tibet than any other place in town,” Charlie said, and Frank giggled again, and more so when Anna exclaimed, “Oh come on love, they aren’t the slightest bit the same!”

“No, yes! I mean they’re more alike than anywhere else around here is like Tibet.”

“What does that mean?” she demanded.

“Water! Nature!” Then: “Sky,” Frank and Charlie both said at the same time.

Sucandra nodded. “I could use some sky. Maybe even a horizon.” And then all the men were chuckling.

Anna went back out to the living room to see if anyone needed anything. She paused to watch Rudra Cakrin and Joe playing with blocks on the floor again. Joe was filled with happiness to have such company, stacking blocks and babbling. Rudra nodded and handed him more. They had been doing that off and on for much of the evening. It occurred to Anna that they were the only two people at the party who did not speak English.

She went back to the kitchen and took over Frank’s spot at the sink, and sent Frank down to the basement to get his shirt out of the dryer. He came back up wearing it, and leaned against a counter talking.

Charlie saw Anna rest against the counter and got her a beer from the fridge. “Here snooks have a drink.”

“Thanks dove.”

Sucandra asked about the kitchen’s wallpaper, which was an uncomfortably brilliant yellow, overlaid with large white birds caught in various moments of flight. When you actually looked at it it was rather bizarre. “I like it,” Charlie said. “It wakes me up. A bit itchy, but basically fine.”

Frank said he was going to go home. Anna walked him around the ground floor to the front door.

“You’ll be able to catch one of the last trains,” she said.

“Yeah I’ll be okay.”

“Thanks for coming, that was fun.”

“Yes it was.”

Again Anna saw that whole smile brighten his face.

“So what’s she like?”

“Well—I don’t know!”

They both laughed.

Anna said, “I guess you’ll find out when you find her.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, and touched her arm briefly, as if to thank her for the thought. Then as he was walking down the sidewalk he looked over his shoulder and called, “I hope she’s like you!”

Frank left Anna and Charlie’s and walked through a warm drizzle back toward the Metro, thinking hard. When he came to the fateful elevator box he stood before it, trying to order his thoughts. It was impossible—especially there. He moved on reluctantly, as if leaving the place would put the experience irrevocably in the past. But it already was. Onward, past the hotel, to the stairs, down to the Metro entry level. He stepped onto the long down escalator and descended into the Earth, thinking.

He recalled Anna and Charlie, in their house with all those people. The way they stood by each other, leaned into each other. The way Anna put a hand on Charlie when she was near him—on this night, avoiding his poisoned patches. The way they shuffled their kids back and forth between them, without actually seeming to notice each other. Or their endlessly varying nicknames for each other, a habit Frank had noticed before, even though he would rather have not: not just the usual endearments like hon, honey, dear, sweetheart, or babe, but also more exotic ones that were saccharine or suggestive beyond belief—snooks, snookybear, honeypie, lover, lovey, lovedove, sweetie-pie, angel man, goddessgirl, kitten, it was unbelievable the inwardness of the monogamous bond, the unconscious twin-world narcissism of it—disgusting! And yet Frank craved that very thing, that easy, deep intimacy that one could take for granted, could lose oneself in. ISO LTR. Primate seeks partner for life. An urge seen in every human culture, and across many species too. It was not crazy of him to want it.

Therefore he was now in a quandary. He wanted to find the woman from the elevator. And Anna had given him the hope that it could be done. It might take some time, but as Anna had pointed out, everyone was in the data banks somewhere. In the Department of Homeland Security records, if nowhere else; but of course elsewhere too. Beg or break your way into Metro maintenance records, how hard could that be? There were people breaking into the genome!

But he wasn’t going to be able to do it from San Diego. Or rather, maybe he could make the hunt from there—you could google someone from anywhere—but if he then succeeded in finding her, it wouldn’t do him any good. It was a big continent. If he found her, if he wanted that to matter, he would need to be in D.C.

And what would he do if he found her?

He couldn’t think about that now. About anything that might happen past the moment of locating her. That would be enough. After that, who knew what she might be like. She had after all jumped him (he shivered at the memory, still there in his flesh), jumped a total stranger in a stuck elevator after twenty minutes of conversation. There was no doubt in his mind that she had initiated the encounter; it simply wouldn’t have occurred to him. Maybe that made him an innocent or a dimwit, but there it was. Maybe on the other hand she was some kind of sexual adventuress, the free papers might be right after all, and certainly everyone talked all the time about women being more sexually assertive, though he had seen little personally to confirm it. Though it had been true of Marta too, come to think of it.

Howsoever that might be, he had been there in the elevator, had shared all responsibility for what happened. And happily so—he was pleased at himself, amazed but glowing. He wanted to find her.

But after that—if he could do it—whatever might happen, if anything were to happen—he needed to be in D.C.

Fine. Here he was.

But he had just put his parting shot in Diane’s in-box that very day, and tomorrow morning she would come in and read it. A letter that was, now that he thought of it, virulently critical, possibly even contemptuous—and how stupid was that, how impolitic, self-indulgent, irrational, maladaptive—what could he have been thinking? Well, somehow he had been angry. Something had made him bitter. He had done it to burn his bridges, so that when Diane had read it he would be toast at NSF.

Whereas without that letter, it would have been a relatively simple matter to re-up for another year. Anna had asked him to, and she had been speaking for Diane, Frank was sure. A year more, and after that he would know where things stood, at least.

A Metro train finally came rumbling windily into the station. Sitting in it as it jerked and rolled into the darkness toward the city, he mulled over in jagged quick images of memory and consideration all that had occurred recently, all crushed and scattered into a kind of kaleidoscope or mandala: Pierzinski’s algorithm, the panel, Marta, Derek, the Khembalis’ lecture; seeing Anna and Charlie, leaning side by side against a kitchen counter. He could make no sense of it really. The parts made sense, but he could not pull a theory out of it. Just a more general sense that the world was going smash.

And, in the context of that sort of world, did he want to go back to a single lab anyway? Could he bear to work on a single tiny chip of the giant mosaic of global problems? It was the way he had always worked before, and it might be the only way one could work, really; but might he not be better off deploying his efforts in a way that magnified them by using them in this small but potentially strong arm of the government, the National Science Foundation? Was that what his letter’s furious critique of NSF had been all about—his frustration that it was doing so little of what it could? If I can’t find a lever I won’t be able to move the world, isn’t that what Archimedes had declared?

In any case his letter was there in Diane’s in-box. He had torched his bridge already. It was very stupid to forestall a possible course of action in such a manner. He was a fool. It was hard to admit, but he had to admit it. The evidence was clear.

But he could go to NSF now and take the letter back.

Security would be there, as always. But people went to work late or early, he could explain himself that way. Still, Diane’s offices would be locked. Security might let him in to his own office, but the twelfth floor? No.

Perhaps he could get there as the first person who arrived on the twelfth floor next morning, and slip in and take it.

But on most mornings the first person to the twelfth floor, famously, was Diane Chang herself. People said she often got there at 4 A.M. So, well … He could be there when she arrived. Just tell her he needed to take back a letter he had put in her box. She might with reason ask to read it first, or she might hand it back, he couldn’t say. But either way, she would know something was wrong with him. And something in him recoiled from that. He didn’t want anyone to know any of this, he didn’t want to look emotionally overwrought or indecisive, or as if he had something to hide. His few encounters with Diane had given him reason to believe she was not one to suffer fools gladly, and he hated to be thought of as one. It was bad enough having to admit it to himself.

And if he were going to continue at NSF, he wanted to be able to do things there. He needed Diane’s respect. It would be so much better if he could take the letter back without her ever knowing he had left it.

Unbidden an old thought leapt to mind. He had often sat in his office cubicle, looking through the window into the central atrium, thinking about climbing the mobile hanging in there. There was a crux in the middle, shifting from one piece of it to another, a stretch of chain that looked to be hard if you were free-climbing it. And a fall would be fatal. But he could come down to it on a rappel from the skylight topping the atrium. He wouldn’t even have to descend as far as the mobile. Diane’s offices were on the twelfth floor, so it would be a short drop. A matter of using his climbing craft and gear, and his old skyscraper window skills. Come down through the skylight, do a pendulum traverse from above the mobile over to her windows, tip one out, slip in, snatch his letter out of the in-box, and climb back out, sealing the windows as he left. No security cameras pointed upward in the atrium, he had noticed during one of his climbing fantasies; there were no alarms on window framing; all would be well. And the top of the building was accessible by a maintenance ladder bolted permanently to the south wall. He had noticed that once while walking by, and had already worked it into various daydreams. Occupying his mind with images of physical action, biomathematics as a kind of climbing of the walls of reality. Or perhaps just compensating for the boredom of sitting in a chair all day.

Now it was a plan, fully formed and ready to execute. He did not try to pretend to himself that it was the most rational plan he had ever made, but he urgently needed to do something physical, right then and there. He was quivering with tension. The operation’s set of physical maneuvers were all things he could do, and that being the case, all the other factors of his situation inclined him to do it. In fact he had to, if he was really going to take responsibility for his life at last, and cast it in the direction of his desire. Make possible whatever follow-up with the woman in the elevator he might later be able to accomplish.

It had to be done.

He got out at the Ballston station, still thinking hard. He walked to the NSF parking garage door by way of the south side of the building to confirm the exterior ladder’s lower height. Bring a box to step on, that’s all it would need. He walked to his car and drove west to his apartment over wet empty streets, not seeing a thing.

At the apartment he went to the closet and pawed through his climbing gear. Below it, as in an archeological dig, were the old tools of a window man’s trade.

When it was all spread on the floor it looked like he had spent his whole life preparing to do this. For a moment, hefting his caulking gun, he hesitated at the sheer weirdness of what he was contemplating. For one thing the caulking gun was useless without caulk, and he had none. He would have to leave cut seals, and eventually someone would see them.

Then he remembered again the woman in the elevator. He felt her kisses still. Only a few hours had passed, though since then his mind had spun through what seemed like years. If he were to have any chance of seeing her again, he had to act. Cut seals didn’t matter. He stuffed all the rest of the gear into his faded red nylon climber’s backpack, which was shredded down one side from a rockfall in the Fourth Recess, long ago. He had done crazy things often back then.