Certainly it was hard to say no to a president-elect inviting you and your toddler to paddle around the Tidal Basin in one of the shiny blue pedal boats docked on the east side of the pond.
And once on the water, it indeed proved very hard to say no to Phil. Joe was wedged between them, lifejacketed and strapped down by Secret Service agents in ways that even Anna would have accepted as safe. He was looking about blissfully; he had even been fully compliant and agreeable about getting into the life jacket and being tied down by the seat belting. It had made Charlie a bit seasick to watch. Now it felt like Phil was doing most of the pumping on the boats foot pedals. He was also steering.
Phil was always in a good mood on the water, rapping away about nothing, looking down at Joe, then over the water at the Jefferson Memorial, the most graceful but least emotional of the citys memorials; beaming at the day, sublimely unaware of the people on the shore path who had noticed him and were exclaiming into their cell phones or taking pictures with them. The Secret Service people had taken roost on the paddle boat dock, and there were an unusual number of men in suits walking the shore among the tourists and joggers.
Where I need you in the room, Phil said out of the blue, is when we gather a global warming task force. Ill be out of my depth in that crowd, and therell be all kinds of information and plans put forth. Thats where Ill want your impressions, both real-time and afterward, to help me crosscheck what I think. It wont do to have me describe these things to you after the fact. There isnt time for that, and besides I might miss the most important thing.
Yeah, well
None of that! This task force will be as close to a Department of Science or a Department for the Environment as I can make. Its going to set the agenda for a lot of what we do. Itll be my strategy group, Charlie, and Im saying I need you in it. Now, Ive looked into the daycare facilities for children at the White House. Theyre adequate, and we can get to work making them even better. Joe will be my target audience. Youd like to play all day with a bunch of kids, wouldnt you Joe?
Yeah Phil, Joe said, happy to be included in the conversation.
Well set up whatever system works best for you, what do you think of that?
I like that, Joe said.
Charlie started to mutter something about the Chinese women who buried their infants up to the neck in riverbank mud every day to leave them to go to work in the rice paddies, but Phil overrode him.
Gymboree in the basement, if thats what it takes! Laser tag, paint-ball wars you name it! Youd like paint-ball wars, wouldnt you Joe.
Big truck, Joe observed, pointing at the traffic on Independence Avenue.
Sure, we could have big trucks too. We could have a monster truck pull right on the White House lawn.
Monster truck. Joe smiled at the phrase.
Charlie sighed. It really seemed to him that Joe should be shouting big trucks right now, or trying to escape and crawling around among the turning pedals underfoot, or leaping overboard to go for a swim. Instead he was listening peacefully to Phils banter, with an expression that said he understood just as much as he wanted to, and approved of it in full.
Ah well. Everyone changed. And in fact, that had been the whole point of the ceremony Charlie had asked the Khembalis to conduct! Charlie had requested it had insisted on it, in fact! But without, he now realized, fully imagining the consequences.
Phil said, So youll do it?
I dont know.
You more or less have to, right? I mean, youre the one who first suggested that I run, when we were over at Lincoln.
Everyone was telling you that.
No they werent. Besides, you were first.
No, you were. I just thought it would work.
And you were right, right?
Apparently so.
So you owe me. You got me into this mess.
Phil smiled, waved at some tourists as he made a broad champing turn back toward the other side of the Basin. Charlie sighed. If he agreed, he would not see Joe anywhere near as much as he was used to an idea he hated. On the other hand, if he didnt see him as much, he wouldnt notice so often how much Joe had changed. And he hated that change.
So much to dislike! Unhappily he said, Ill have to talk to Anna about it first. But I think shell go for it. Shes pretty pro-work. So. Shit. Ill give it a try. Ill give it a few months, and see how it goes. By that time your task force should be on their way, and I can see where things stand and go emeritus if I need to.
Good. And Phil pedaled furiously, almost throwing Charlies knees up into his chin with the force of his enthusiasm. He said, Look, Joe, all the people are waving at you!
Joe waved back. Hi people! he shouted. Big truck, right there! Look! I like that big truck. Thats a good truck.
And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of the fundamental mysteries.
Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming. This was, he thought, an indicator of how happy he had been with the way things were, the situation as he had had it. Mister Mom he had loved it. Just this last May he had been walking down Leland Street and had passed Djina, one of the Gymboree moms he knew, biking the other way, and he had called out to her Happy Mothers Day! and she had called back, Same to you! and he had felt a glow in him that had lasted an hour. Someone had understood.
Of course the pure mom routine of the 1950s was an Ozzie and Harriet nightmare, a crazy-making program so effective that the surprise was there were any moms at all in that generation who had stayed sane. Most of them had gone nuts in one way or another, because in its purest form that life was too constrained to the crucial but mindless daily chores of child-rearing and house maintenance uncompensated labor, as the economists put it, but in a larger sense than what they meant with their idiot bean-counting. Coming in the fifties, hard on the heels of World War Twos shattering of all norms, its huge chaotic space of dislocation and freedom for young women, it must have felt like a return to prison after a big long break-out.
But that wasnt the life Charlie had been leading. Along with the child care and the shopping and the housework had been his real work as a senatorial aide, which, even though it had been no more than a few phone conversations a day, had bolstered the unreal work of Mr. Momhood in a curious dual action. Eventually which work was real had become a moot point; the upshot was that he felt fulfilled, and the lucky and accidental recipient of a full life. Maybe even overfull! But that was what happened when Freuds short list of the important things in life work and love were all in play.
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 couldnt 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 Das 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! Were off to school and work, to the White House! They have a great daycare center there, itll be like Gymboree!
Joe looked up. Gymboree?
Yes, like Gymboree, but not it exactly. Charlies 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 Joiners 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, Im going to drop you off at the daycare center here at the White House. Youre 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 thats right. Maybe youll love it.
It was at least possible. Vivid in Charlies mind was Annas story about taking Nick to daycare for the first time, and seeing Nicks 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. Joes eyes grew round. Hey Dad! Big Gymboree!
Thats right, like Gymboree. Except Im going to go, Joe. Im going to go and leave you here.
Bye Dad! And off he ran without a backward glance.
TWO Cut to the Chase
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 Congresss 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 Worlds 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 states 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 Worlds 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 plumbers 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.