Forgotten.
Yes.
We dont remember our reports either, Edgardo said. There are several NSF reports on this issue. Ive got one here called Environmental Science and Engineering for the 21st Century, The Role of the National Science Foundation. It called for quadrupling the money NSF gave to its environmental programs, and suggested everyone else in government and industry do the same. Look at this table in it forty-five percent of Earths land surface transformed by humans fifty percent of surface freshwater used two thirds of the marine fisheries fully exploited or depleted. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere thirty percent higher than before the industrial revolution. A quarter of all bird species extinct. He looked up at them over his reading glasses. All these figures are worse now.
Diane looked at the copy of the page Edgardo had passed around. Clearly ignorance of the situation has not been the problem. The problem is acting on what we know. Maybe people will be ready for that now. Better late than never.
Unless it is too late, Edgardo suggested.
Diane had said the same thing to Frank in private, but now she said firmly, Lets proceed on the assumption that it is never too late. I mean, here we are. So lets get Sophie in, and prepare something for the White House and the congressional committees. Some plans. Things we can do right now, concerning both the Gulf Stream and global warming more generally.
Well need to scare the shit out of them, Edgardo said.
Yes. Well, the marks of the flood are still all over town. That should help.
People are already fond of the flood, Edgardo said. It was an adventure. It got people out of their ruts.
Nevertheless, Diane said, with a grimace that was still somehow cheerful or amused. Scaring politicians might be something she looked forward to.
Given all that he had to do at work, Frank didnt usually get away as early as he would have liked. But the June days were long, and with the treehouse finished there was no great rush to accomplish any particular task. Once in the park, he could wander up the West Ridge Trail and choose where to drop deeper to the east, looking for animals. Just north of Military Road the trail ran past the high point of the park, occupied by the site of Fort DeRussey, now low earthen bulwarks. One evening he saw movement inside the bulwarks, froze: some kind of antelope, its russet coloring not unlike the mounded earth, its neck stretched as it pulled down a branch with its mouth to strip off leaves. White stripes running diagonally up from its white belly. An exotic for sure. A feral from the zoo, and his first nondescript!
It saw him, and yet continued to eat. Its jaw moved in a rolling, side-to-side mastication; the bottom jaw was the one that stayed still. It was alert to his movements, and yet not skittish. He wondered if there were any general feral characteristics, if escaped zoo animals were more trusting or less than the local natives. Something to ask Nancy.
Abruptly the creature shot away through the trees. It was big! Frank grinned, pulled out his FOG phone and called it in. The cheap little cell phone was on something like a walkie-talkie or party line system, and Nancy or one of her assistants usually picked up right away. Sorry, I dont really know what it was. He described it the best he could. Pretty lame, but what could he do? He needed to learn more. Call Clark on phone 12, Nancy suggested, hes the ungulate guy. No need to GPS the sighting, being right in the old fort.
He hiked down the trail that ran from the fort to the creek, paralleling Military Road and then passing under its big bridge, which had survived but was still closed. It was nice and quiet in the ravine, with Beach Drive gone and all the roads crossing the park either gone or closed for repairs. A sanctuary.
Green light in the muggy late afternoon. He kept an eye out for more animals, thinking about what might happen to them in the abrupt climate change Kenzo said they were now entering. All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps devastated. That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic; everything would have to go feral.
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 arent you playing frisbee? They ran by just a while ago.
Did they? Maybe Ill 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.
Wholl 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 Chicagos. 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 Posts 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 dont know what the right one is doing, he muttered again. Frank had already observed that they always said the same things; but didnt everybody? He finished his slice and crouched down to tend their smoky fire. Hey someones got potatoes burning in here.
Oh yeah, pull those out! You can have one if you want.
Dont you know you cant cook no potato on no fire?
Sure you can! How you do 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, theyll put you in their volunteer group. Theyll give you a pass to be in the park.
You think we need a pass?
We be the ones giving them a pass!
Theyll 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 kings 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 Zenos 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.
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, theyll put you in their volunteer group. Theyll give you a pass to be in the park.
You think we need a pass?
We be the ones giving them a pass!
Theyll 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 kings 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 Zenos 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.
Lastly 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 Franks 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 ladders spindle to bring the ladder up after him without wasting battery power. Once it was secured, and the lubbers 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 treehouse.
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.