Green Earth

“Something new?”

“Yeah, I’m trying something out of the paper.”

“You’re being careful?”

He grinned. “Yeah, no blackened redfish.”

“Blackened redfish?” Nick repeated, alarmed.

“Don’t worry, even I wouldn’t try it on you.”

“He wouldn’t want you to catch fire.”

“Hey, it was in the recipe. It was right out of the recipe!”

“So? A tablespoon each of black pepper, white pepper, cayenne, and chili powder?”

“How was I supposed to know?”

“What do you mean? You should have known what a tablespoon of pepper would taste like, and that was the least hot of them.”

“I guess I didn’t know it would all stick to the fish.”

Nick was looking appalled. “I wouldn’t eat that.”

“You aren’t kidding,” Anna laughed. “One touch with your tongue and you would spontaneously combust.”

“It was in a cookbook.”

“Even going in the kitchen next day was enough to burn your eyes out.”

Charlie was giggling at his folly, holding the stirring spoon down to Nick to gross him out, although now he had a very light touch with the spices. The curry would be fine. Anna left him to it and went out to play with Joe.

She sat down on the couch, relaxed. Joe began to pummel her knees with blocks, babbling energetically. At the same time Nick was telling her something about something. She had to interrupt him, almost, to tell him about the coming of the Swimming Tigers. He nodded and took off again with his account. She heaved a great sigh of relief, took a sip of the beer. Another day flown past like a dream.

Another heat wave struck, the worst so far. People had thought it was hot before, but now it was July, and one day the temperature in the metropolitan area climbed to 105 degrees, with the humidity over ninety percent. The combination had all the Indians in town waxing nostalgic about Uttar Pradesh just before the monsoon broke. “Oh yes just like this in Delhi, actually it would be a blessing if it were to be like this in Delhi, that would be an improvement over what they have now, they need the monsoon very badly.”

The morning Post included an article informing Charlie that a chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf had broken off, a chunk more than half the size of France. The news was buried in the last pages of the international section. So many pieces of Antarctica had fallen off that it wasn’t big news anymore.

It wasn’t big news, but it was a big iceberg. Researchers joked about moving onto it and declaring it a new nation. It contained more fresh water than all the Great Lakes combined. And pouring down toward it, researchers said, was the rapid ice of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, unimpeded now that the Ross Shelf in that region had embarked. This accelerated flow of ice had big implications. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet was much bigger than the Ross Ice Shelf, and if it broke up sea level might rise a few meters, quite quickly.

Charlie read on, amazed that he was learning this in the back pages of the Post. How fast could this happen? The researchers didn’t appear to know. Charlie followed it up on the web, and watched one trio of researchers explain on camera that it could become an accelerating process, their words likewise accelerating a bit as if to illustrate how it would go. It might happen fast.

Charlie heard in their voices the kind of repressed delirium of scientific excitement that he had once or twice heard when listening to Anna talk about some extraordinary thing in statistics that he had not even been able to understand. This, however, he understood; they were saying that the possibility was very real that the whole mass of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would break apart and float away, each giant piece of it then sinking more deeply into the water, thus displacing more water than it had when grounded in place—so much more that sea level worldwide could rise by an eventual total of up to seven meters. It depended on variables programmed into the models—on they went, the usual kind of scientist talk.

And yet the Post had it at the back of the international section! People were talking about it the same way they did any other disaster. There did not seem to be any way to register a distinction in response between one coming catastrophe and another. If it happened it happened. That seemed to be the way people were processing it. Of course the Khembalis would have to be extremely concerned. The whole League of Drowning Nations, for that matter. Really everyone. All of a sudden it coalesced into a clear vision, and what he saw frightened him. Twenty percent of humanity lived on coasts. He felt like he had one time driving in winter when he had taken a turn too fast and hit an icy patch he hadn’t seen, and the car had detached and he found himself flying forward, free of friction or even gravity, as if sideslipping in reality itself …

But it was time to go downtown. He was going to take Joe with him to the office. He pulled himself together, got out the stroller so they would spare each other their body heat. Life had to go on; what else could he do?

Out they ventured into the steambath of the capital. It really didn’t feel that much different than an ordinary summer day; it was as if the sensation of heat hit an upper limit where it just blurred out. Joe was seat-belted into his stroller like a NASCAR driver, so that he would not launch himself out at inopportune moments. Naturally he did not like this, and he objected to the stroller because of it, but Charlie had decorated its front bar as an airplane cockpit dashboard, which placated Joe enough that he did not persist in his howls or attempts to escape.

They took the elevators in the Metro stations, and came up on the Mall to stroll over to Phil’s office. A bad idea, as crossing the Mall was like being blanched in boiling air. Charlie, as always, experienced the climate deviation with a kind of grim “I told you so” satisfaction.

At Phil’s they rolled around the rooms trying to find the best spots in the falls of chilled air pouring from the air-conditioning vents. Everyone was doing this, drifting around to find the coolest drafts, like a science museum exercise investigating the Coriolis force.

Charlie parked Joe out with Evelyn, who loved him, and went to work on Phil’s revisions to the climate bill. It certainly seemed like a good time to introduce it. More money for carbon remediation, new fuel efficiency standards and the money to get Detroit through the transition to hydrogen, new fuels and power sources, carbon capture methods, carbon sink identification and formation, hydrocarbon-to-carbohydrate-to-hydrogen conversion funds and exchange credit programs, deep geothermal, tide power, wave power, money for basic research in climatology, money for the Extreme Global Research in Emergency Salvation Strategies project (EGRESS), money for the Global Disaster Information Network (GDIN), an escalating carbon tax—and so on and so forth. It was a grab bag of programs, many designed to look like pork to help the bill get the votes, but Charlie had done his best to give the whole thing organization, and a kind of coherent shape, as a narrative of the near future.

There were many in Phil’s office who thought it was a mistake to try to pass an omnibus or comprehensive bill like this, rather than get the programs funded one by one, or in smaller related groupings. But the comprehensive had been Phil’s chosen strategy, and Charlie agreed with it. He added language to make the revisions Phil wanted, pushing the envelope in each case. Now was the time to strike.

Joe was beginning to get rowdy with Evelyn, he could hear the unmistakable sound of dinosaurs hitting walls. All this language would get chopped up anyway; still, best get it armored against attack. Bill language as low-post moves to the basket, subtle, quick, unstoppable.

He rushed to a finish and took the revised bill in to Phil, with Joe leading the way in his stroller. They found the senator sitting with his back directly against an air-conditioning duct.

“Jeez Phil, don’t you get too cold sitting there?”

“The trick is to set up before you’re all sweaty.” He glanced over Charlie’s new revision, and they argued over some of the changes. At one point Phil looked at him: “Something bugging you today?” He glanced over at Joe. “Joe here seems to be grooving.”

“It’s not Joe that’s getting to me, it’s you. You and the rest of the Senate. Because the current situation requires a response that is more than business as usual. And that worries me, because you guys only do business as usual.”

“Well …” Phil smiled. “We call that democracy, youth. It’s a blessing when you think of it. Some give-and-take, and then some agreement on how to proceed. How can we do without that? If you have a better way of doing it, you tell me. But meanwhile, no more ‘If I Were King’ fantasies. There’s no king and it’s up to us. So help me get this final draft as tight as we can.”

“Okay.”

They worked together with the speed and efficiency of old teammates. Sometimes collaboration could be a pleasure, sometimes it really was a matter of only having to do half of it, and the two halves adding up to more than their parts.

Then Joe got restive, and nothing would keep him in his stroller but a quick departure and a tour of the street scene. “I’ll finish,” Phil said.

So, back out into the stupendous heat. Charlie was knocked out by it faster than Joe. The world melted around them. Charlie gumbied along, leaning on the stroller for support. Down an elevator into the Metro. Air-conditioning again, thank God. Crash into pink seat cushions. As they rode north, slumped and rocking slightly with their train, Charlie drowsily entertained Joe with some of the toys in the stroller, picking them up and fingering them one by one. “See, this turtle is NIH. Your Frankenstein monster is the FDA, look how poorly he’s put together. This little mole, that’s Mom’s NSF. These two guys, they’re like the guy on the Monopoly game, they must be the two parts of Congress, yeah, very Tammany Hall. Where the hell did you get those. Your Iron Giant is of course the Pentagon, and this yellow bulldozer is the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. The magnifying glass is the GAO, and this, what is this, Barbie? That must be the OMB, those bimbos, or maybe this Pinocchio here. And your cowboy on a horse is the President of course, he’s your friend, he’s your friend.”

They were both falling asleep. Joe batted the toy figures into a pile.

“Careful Joe. Ooh, there’s your tiger. That’s the press corps, that’s a circus tiger, see its collar? Nobody’s scared of it. Although sometimes it does get to eat somebody.”

Phil took the climate bill back to the Foreign Relations Committee, and the process of marking it up began in earnest. To mark up was a very inadequate verb: “carving,” “rendering,” “hacking,” “hatcheting,” “stomping,” any of these would have been more accurate, Charlie thought as he tracked the gradual deconstruction of the language of the bill, the result turned slowly into a kind of sausage of thought.

The bill lost parts as they duked it out. Winston fought every phrase of it, and he had to be given some concessions or nothing would proceed. No further increase in fuel efficiencies, no acknowledgment of any measurements like the ecological footprint. Phil gave on these because Winston was promising that he would get the House to agree to this version in conference, and the White House would back him too. And so entire methodologies of analysis were being declared off-limits, something that would drive Anna crazy. Another example of science and capital clashing, Charlie thought. Science was like Beaker from the Muppets, haplessly struggling with the round top-hatted guy from the Monopoly game. Right now Beaker was getting his butt kicked.

Two mornings later Charlie learned about it in the Post:

CLIMATE SUPERBILL SPLIT UP IN COMMITTEE

“Say what!” Charlie hadn’t even heard of this possibility. He read paragraphs per eye-twitch while he told his phone to call Roy:

… proponents of the new bills claimed compromises would not damage effectiveness … President made it clear he would veto the comprehensive bill … promised to sign specific bills on a case-by-case basis …

“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 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.”

“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 tell you, they made me do it.”

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

Phil shook his head vehemently. “I got more than I gave. They’re going to reduce carbon emissions anyway, we were never going to get more 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 shtick: 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, if Phil’s group 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!”

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.”

“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, 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 of the Metro car. 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 to 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 recollected 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 did. 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.”

“Why do you say ‘Jesus,’ Dad?”

“It’s a long story, ha. Okay here’s another. 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 into 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?”

CHAPTER 8

A PARADIGM SHIFT

Let’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 away 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 300 cubic centimeters to about 1200 cubic centimeters. 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.

Anna was pleased to see Frank back in the office, brusque and grouchy though he was. He made things more interesting. A rant against oversized pickup trucks would morph into an explanation of everything in terms of yes or no, or a discussion of the social intelligence of gibbons, or an algebra of the most efficient division of labor in the lab. It was impossible to predict what he would say next. Sentences would start reasonably and then go strange, or vice versa. Anna liked that.