Fifty Degrees Below (9 page)

He walked south on a route that stayed on the rim of the damaged part of the gorge as much as possible. When he came to site 21 he found the homeless guys there as usual, sitting around looking kind of beat.

“Hey, Doc! Why aren’t you playing frisbee? They ran by just a while ago.”

“Did they? Maybe I’ll catch them on their way back.”

Frank regarded them; hanging around in the steamy sunset, smoking in their own fire, empties dented on the ground around them. Frank found he was thirsty, and hungry.

“Who’ll eat pizza if I go get one?”

Everyone would. “Get some beer too!” Zeno said, with a hoarse laugh that falsely insinuated this was a joke.

Frank hiked out to Connecticut and bought thin-crusted pizzas from a little stand across from Chicago’s. He liked them because he thought the owner of the stand was mocking the thick pads of dough that characterized the pizzas in the famous restaurant. Frank was a thin-crust man himself.

Back into the dusky forest, two boxes held like a waiter. Then pizza around the fire, with the guys making their usual desultory conversation. The vet always studying the
Post
’s federal news section did indeed appear well-versed in the ways of the federal bureaucracy, and he definitely had a chip on his shoulder about it. “The left hand don’t know what the right one is doing,” he muttered again. Frank had already observed that they always said the same things; but didn’t everybody? He finished his slice and crouched down to tend their smoky fire. “Hey someone’s got potatoes burning in here.”

“Oh yeah, pull those out! You can have one if you want.”

“Don’t you know you can’t cook no potato on no fire?”

“Sure you can! How do you think?”

Frank shook his head; the potato skins were charred at one end, green at the other. Back in the paleolithic there must have been guys hanging out somewhere beyond the cave, guys who had offended the alpha male or killed somebody by accident or otherwise fucked up—or just not been able to understand the rules—or failed to find a mate (like Frank)—and they must have hunkered around some outlier fire, eating lukewarm pizza and making crude chitchat that was always the same, laughing at their old jokes.

“I saw an antelope up in the old fort,” he offered.

“I saw a tapir,” the
Post
reader said promptly.

“Come on Fedpage, how you know it was a tapir.”

“I saw that fucking
jaguar,
I swear.”

Frank sighed. “If you report it to the zoo, they’ll put you in their volunteer group. They’ll give you a pass to be in the park.”

“You think we need a pass?”

“We be the ones giving them a pass!”

“They’ll give you a cell phone too.” That surprised them.

Chessman slipped in, glancing at Frank, and Frank nodded unenthusiastically; he had been about to leave. And it was his turn to play black. Chessman set out the board between them and moved out his king’s pawn.

Suddenly Zeno and Andy were arguing over ownership of the potatoes. It was a group that liked to argue. Zeno was among the worst of these; he would switch from friendly to belligerent within a sentence, and then back again. Abrupt climate change. The others were more consistent. Andy was consistently abrasive with his unfunny humor, but friendly. Fedpage was always shaking his head in disgust at something he was reading. The silent guy with the silky dark red beard was always subdued, but when he spoke always complained, often about the police. Another regular was older, with faded blond-gray hair, pockmarked face, not many teeth. Then there was Jory, an olive-skinned skinny man with greasy black hair and a voice that sounded so much like Zeno’s that Frank at first confused them when listening to their chat. He was if anything even more volatile than Zeno, but had no friendly mode, being consistently obnoxious and edgy. He would not look at Frank except in sidelong glances that radiated hostility.

Last among the regulars was Cutter, a cheery, bulky black guy, who usually arrived with a cut of meat to cook on the fire, always providing a pedigree for it in the form of a story of petty theft or salvage. Adventures in food acquisition. He often had a couple of buddies with him, knew Chessman, and appeared to have a job with the city park service, judging by his shirts and his stories. He more than the others reminded Frank of his window-washing days, also the climbing crowd—a certain rowdy quality—life considered as one outdoor sport after the next. It seemed as if Cutter had somewhere else as his base; and he had also given Frank the idea of bringing by food.

Chessman suddenly blew in on the left flank and Frank resigned, shaking his head as he paid up. “Next time,” he promised. The fire guttered out, and the food and beer were gone. The potatoes smoldered on a table top. The guys slowed down in their talk. Redbeard slipped off into the night, and that made it okay for Frank to do so as well. Some of them made their departures into a big production, with explanations of where they were going and why, and when they would likely return again; others just walked off, as if to pee, and did not come back. Frank said, “Catch you guys,” in order not to appear unfriendly, but only as he was leaving, so that it was not an opening to any inquiries.

Off north to his tree. Ladder called down, the motor humming like the sound of his brain in action.

The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spent almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that—even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parcelled out. There were:

1. the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;

2. the people you worked with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;

3. the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week;

4. then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, or eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full calendar according to Frank’s calculations so far, suggesting they were all living more hours a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety, except you yourself.

One could, therefore:

1. pursue a project in paleolithic living,

2. change the weather,

3. attempt to restructure your profession, and

4. be happy,

all at once, although
not
simultaneously, but moving from one thing to another, among differing populations; behaving as if a different person in each situation. It could be done, because
there were no witnesses
. No one saw enough to witness your life and put it all together.

Through the lowest leaves of his tree appeared the aluminum-runged nylon rope ladder. One of his climbing friends had called this kind of ice-climbing ladder a “Miss Piggy,” perhaps because the rungs resembled pig iron, perhaps because Miss Piggy had stood on just such a ladder for one of her arias in
The Muppets’ Treasure Island
. Frank grabbed one of the rungs, tugged to make sure all was secure above, and started to climb, still pursuing his train of thought. The parcellated life. Fully optimodal. No reason not to enjoy it; and suddenly he realized that he
was
enjoying it. It was like being a versatile actor in a repertory theater, shifting constantly from role to role, and all together they made up his life, and part of the life of his time.

Cheered by the thought, he ascended the upper portion of his Miss Piggy, swaying as little as possible among the branches. Then through the gap, up and onto his plywood floor.

He hand-turned the crank on the ladder’s spindle to bring the ladder up after him without wasting battery power. Once it was secured, and the lubber’s hole filled with a fitted piece of plywood, he could relax. He was home.

Against the trunk was his big duffel bag under the tarp, all held in place by bungee cords. From the duffel he pulled the rolled-up foam mattress, as thick and long as a bed. Then pillows, mosquito net, sleeping bag, sheet. On these warm nights he slept under the sheet and mosquito net, and only used his down bag as a blanket near dawn.

Lie down, stretch out, feel the weariness of the day bathe him. Slight sway of the tree: yes, he was up in a tree house.

The idea made him happy. His childhood fantasy had been the result of visits to the big concrete treehouse at Disneyland. He had been eight years old when he first saw it, and it had bowled him over: the elaborate waterwheel-powered bamboo plumbing system, the bannistered stairs spiraling up the trunk, the big living room with its salvaged harmonium, catwalks to the separate bedrooms on their branches, open windows on all four sides. . . .

His current aerie was a very modest version of that fantasy, of course. Just the basics: a ledge bivouac rather than the Swiss family mansion, and indeed his old camping gear was well-represented around him, augmented by some nifty car-camping extras, like the lantern and the foam mattress and the pillows from the apartment. Stuff scavenged from the wreckage of his life, as in any other Robinsonade.

The tree swayed and whooshed in the wind. He sat on his thick foam pad, his back holding it up against the trunk. Luxurious reading in bed. Around him laptop, cell phone, a little cooler; his backpack held a bathroom bag and a selection of clothing; a Coleman battery-powered lantern. In short, everything he needed. The lamp cast a pool of light onto the plywood. No one would see it. He was in his own space, and yet at the same time right in the middle of Washington, D.C. One of the ferals in the ever-encroaching forest.
“Oooop, oop oop ooooop!”
His tree swayed back and forth in the wind. He switched off his lamp and slept like a babe.

Except his cell phone rang, and he rolled over and answered it without fully waking. “Hello?”

“Frank Vanderwal?”

“Yes? What time is it?” And where am I?

“It’s the middle of the night. Sorry, but this is when I can call.” As he was recognizing her voice, she went on: “We met in that elevator that stuck.”

Already he was sitting up. “Ah yeah of course! I’m glad you called.”

“I said I would.”

“I know.”

“Can you meet?”

“Sure I can. When?”

“Now.”

“Okay.”

Frank checked his watch. It was three in the morning.

“That’s when I can do it,” she explained.

“That’s fine. Where?”

“There’s a little park, near where we first met. Two blocks south of there, a block east of Wisconsin. There’s a statue in the middle of the park, with a bench under it. Would that be okay?”

“Sure. It’ll take me, I don’t know, half an hour to get there. Less, actually.”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

The connection went dead.

Again he had failed to get her name, he realized as he dressed and rolled his sleeping gear under the tarp. He brushed his teeth while putting on his shoes, wondering what it meant that she had called now. Then the ladder finished lowering and down he went, swaying hard and holding on as he banged into a branch. Not a good time to fall, oh no indeed.

On the ground, the ladder sent back up. Leaving the park the streetlights blazed in his eyes, caged in blue polygons or orange globes; it was like crossing an empty stage set. He drove over to Wisconsin and up it, then turned right onto Elm Street. Lots of parking here. And there was the little park she had mentioned. He had not known it existed. It was dark except for one orange streetlight at its north end, near a row of tennis courts. He parked and got out.

Midpark a small black statue of a female figure held up a black hoop. The streetlight and the city’s noctilucent cloud illuminated everything faintly but distinctly. It reminded Frank of the light in the NSF building on the night of his abortive b-and-e, and he shook his head, not wanting to recall that folly; then he recalled that that was the night they had met, that he had broken into the NSF building specifically because he had decided to stay in D.C. and search for this woman.

And there she was, sitting on the park bench. It was 3:34
A.M.
and there she sat, on a park bench in the dark. Something in the sight made him shiver, and then he hurried to her.

She saw him coming and stood up, stepped around the bench. They stopped face to face. She was almost as tall as he was. Tentatively she reached out a hand, and he touched it with his. Their fingers intertwined. Slender long fingers. She freed her hand and gestured at the park bench, and they sat down on it.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“Oh hey. I’m so glad you called.”

“I didn’t know, but I thought. . . .”

“Please. Always call. I wanted to see you again.”

“Yes.” She smiled a little, as if aware that
seeing
was not the full verb for what he meant. Again Frank shuddered: who was she, what was she doing?

“Tell me your name. Please.”

“. . . Caroline.”

“Caroline what?”

“Let’s not talk about that yet.”

Now the ambient light was too dim; he wanted to see her better. She looked at him with a curious expression, as if puzzling how to proceed.

“What?” he said.

She pursed her lips.

“What?”

She said, “Tell me this. Why did you follow me into that elevator?”

Frank had not known she had noticed that. “Well! I . . . I liked the way you looked.”

She nodded, looked away. “I thought so.” A tiny smile, a sigh: “Look,” she said, and stared down at her hands. She fiddled with the ring on her left ring finger.

“What?”

“You’re being watched.” She looked up, met his gaze. “Do you know that?”

“No! But what do you mean?”

“You’re under surveillance.”

Frank sat up straighter, shifted back and away from her. “By whom?”

She almost shrugged. “It’s part of Homeland Security.”

“What?”

“An agency that works with Homeland Security.”