Fifty Degrees Below (44 page)

“Dropped us food too.”

“That’s right, we were going to starve as well as get massacred. It was a race to see which. Incompetent bastards.”

“We shared the last food, remember that?”

“Of course. A fucking spoonful. Didn’t do any of us a bit of good.”

“It was a team thing. You should have seen Zeno the time we heloed down into a minefield and the medic wouldn’t get out to help some wounded. Zeno just jumped out and ran right across that minefield, he led those brothers back in just like there weren’t no mines out there. Even after one of them went off and dee-exed a guy who didn’t follow right in his footsteps.”

“You did that?” Frank said.

“Yeah well,” Zeno said. He looked away, shrugged. “That was my Zeno’s paradox moment I guess. I mean if you’re always only halfway there, then you can’t ever step on no mine, right?”

Frank laughed.

“It was great,” Fedpage insisted.

“No it wasn’t. It was just what it was. Then you get back to the States and it’s all like some bad movie. Some stupid fucking sitcom. That’s America man. It’s all such bullshit. People act like they’re such big deals, they act like all their rules are real when really they’re just bullshit so they can keep you down and take everything for themselves.”

“True,” Fedpage said.

“Ha ha. Well, here we are. Looks like the fire is about halfway down. Who’s going to go get more wood for this fire, I ain’t gonna do it.”

“So did you ever go up to the shelter?”

“Sure.”

The hard wind finally struck as forecast, and it got bad again for a couple days, as bad as in the beginning. “It ain’t the cold, it’s the—”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Frozen branches snapped and fell all over town, on people, cars, power lines, rooftops. Frank went out every day and helped Cutter and his crew. Then one day, clearing a fallen tree from a downed power line, a branch swung his way and thwacked him on the face.

“Oh sorry I couldn’t get that! Hey Frank! Hey are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Frank said, hands at his face. He still couldn’t feel his nose. He tasted blood at the back of his throat, swallowed. It was nothing new. It happened from time to time. It even tasted like old blood, left over from the original injury. He shook it off, kept on carrying wood.

The next morning, however, he got out of his van and walked up and down Connecticut, and—he couldn’t decide what to do. Time for a leap before you look, therefore; do whatever came to hand. But where to start?

He never got started. He walked up Connecticut to Chevy Chase Circle, then back down to the zoo. How big the world became when it tasted like blood.

He stopped at a stoplight to think it over. He could help at the zoo, or he could help Cutter, or he could look for Chessman, or he could help at the shelter, or he could go to work, or he could go for a run, or a hike, or a climb. Or he could read a book. His current reading was
The Long Winter
by Laura Ingalls Wilder, a real beauty, the story of a small Dakota town surviving the extreme winter of 1880. The town had lost all contact with the rest of humanity, cut off by huge snowpacks from October to May. Talk about island refugia! He had gotten to the part where they were almost starving.

So he could read. He could sit in a coffee shop and read his book, and no one would have any reason to object. Or he could go work out at the club. Or . . .

He was still standing aimlessly at the corner of Connecticut and Tilden when his cell phone rang.

It was Nick Quibler. School had been cancelled for the day, and he was wondering if Frank was available to go on a FOG hunt.

“I sure am,” Frank croaked. “Thanks for thinking of it.”

WHEN CHARLIE GOT HOME FROM THE grocery store, where the shelves had been largely empty, Anna and Joe were out, but Nick was already back, playing his gameboy.

“Hey Nick, how was your FOG trip with Frank?”

“Oh. Well, it wasn’t a big accident.”

“Uh oh.” This phrase was a family joke, recalling a time when a much younger Nick had tried to delay telling his parents about something bad he had caused to happen at preschool; but this time Nick wasn’t smiling. Curiously focused on his gameboy, in fact. “What do you mean it wasn’t a big accident?”

“Well, you know. No
people
got hurt.”

“That’s good, but what did happen?”

“Well. You know. It wasn’t so good for one of the gibbons.”

“Uh oh, how so?”

“One died.”

“Oh no! How did it happen?” Hand to Nick’s shoulder; Nick stayed focused on the game. “What happened, bud?”

“Well you see, it’s too cold for them now.”

“I bet! That’s true for a lot of the animals, right?”

“Right. And so they have these heated shelters out in the park, and all the animals are using them now, but some of the animals are hard to catch even when they do use them. The gibbons and siamangs are like that, they sit on the roofs and run away if you try to get close, and some of them have died. They found two of them frozen. So they decided they better try to capture the ones still out there, before they died too.”

“That makes sense.”

“Yeah, but they’re really hard to get near. They swing through the trees? It’s really cool. So you have to kind of hunt them down if you want to, you know.”

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah. You have to shoot them with a tranquilizer dart.”

“Oh yeah. I used to see that on
Wild Kingdom
.”

“They do it on
Animal Planet
all the time.”

“Do they. That’s good to know. That’s continuity. But I remember one time when I was a kid, this hippo got out of Lion Country Safari, and they shot it with too much.”

“No, not that.”

“What then?”

“Well, they’re always up in the trees. And Frank is the only one who can really get very close to them.”

“Ha. Our Frank is something.”

“Yeah, he can sound just like them. And he can walk without making any noise. It’s really cool.”

“How the heck does he do that?”

“He looks where he’s going! I mean he walks along and his face is pointed right down at the ground most of the time.”

“Like a dog?”

“No, more like a bird. He’s always looking around, zip zip, you know.”

“Ah yeah. And so?”

“So we were up by Military Road and we got a call that someone had spotted a gibbon pair near the Nature Center going down toward the creek, so we went down the creekbed, you can walk right on the ice, and we got in those rocks down by the creek?”

“Which?”

“The Nook and Cranny rocks, you can see through the cranny upstream, and so we laid in wait for a while and—”

“What do you do when you’re lying in wait?”

“We just stand there real quiet. You can be careful about how you breathe, it’s pretty cool.”

“Ah yeah. And so then?”

“So then three gibbons came past us, and they weren’t up very high and Frank had the gun balanced on the Nook and was ready for them. He shot one right in the butt, but then some people yelled.”

“Other FOG people?”

“No, just we didn’t know who, and the gibbons took off and Frank took off running after them.”

“Didn’t you too?”

“Yeah I did, but he was fast. I couldn’t keep up. So but neither could he, not with the gibbons, they just fly along, but the one he shot fell. From way up there.”

“Oh no.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh no. So Frank couldn’t . . .”

“No, he tried but he couldn’t keep up. He wasn’t there to catch it.”

“So it died?”

“Yeah. Frank picked it up. He checked it out.”

“He was hoping it was still alive.”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t. It got killed by the fall. I mean it looked okay, but it was . . . loose. It wasn’t there.”

“Oh no. How awful. What did Frank do?”

“He was kind of upset.”

THE BARE BRANCHES OVERHEAD WERE LIKE black lightning bolts striking out of the Earth into the clouds. Like decision maps, first choose this, then that. He was cold, cold in his head somehow. All his thoughts congealed. Maybe if he weren’t injured. Maybe next winter. Maybe if it wasn’t a long winter. Maybe they all had to find their cave.
Fur esh var kalt.

Wind ripped through the branches with a sound like tearing cloth. A big sound. Under it the city hummed almost inaudibly. Snow cracked as he stepped on it. There was no way to walk quietly now. The branches overhead were like black fireworks, flailing the sky. He moved under them toward the gorge, shifting his weight one pound at a time.

Eventually he came to one of the heated shelters. Little square hut, its open side facing south. Hot box; all interior surfaces emanated heat. Like a big toaster oven left open. A bad thought, given the way toaster ovens worked.

Inside, and scattered around the opening, they stood or sat or lay. Rabbits, raccoons, deer, elands, tapirs, even foxes, even a bobcat. Two ibex. None meeting the eye of any other; all pretending they were each alone, or with only their own kind. As on an island created in a flood, it was a case of stay there or die. Truce. Time out.

Very slowly he approached. He kept his head down, his eyes to the side. He sidled. He crabbed. Shoulders hunched lower and lower. He turned his back to them entirely as he closed on them, and sat down in the lee of the shelter, about fifteen feet out from it, in a little hollow floored with snow. He shifted back toward them to get off the snow, onto a decomposed black log. Fairly dry, fairly comfortable. The heat from the shelter was palpable, it rushed over him intermittently on the wind, like a stream. He rested his head on his chest, arms around his knees. A long time passed; he wasn’t sleepy, but long intervals passed during which no thoughts came to him. A gust of chill air roused him, and he shifted so he could see more of the shelter out of the corner of his eye. At the very edge of his peripheral vision lay what could have been the jaguar.

The animals were not happy. They all stared at him, wary, affronted. He was messing up a good situation. The lion had lain down with the lamb, but the man was not welcome. He wanted to reassure them, to explain to them that he meant no harm, that he was one of them. But there were no words.

Much later there was a crack, a branch breaking. In a sudden flurry many animals slipped away.

Frank looked up. It was Drepung, and Charlie Quibler. They approached him, crouched by his side. “Come with us, Frank,” Drepung said.

VIII

ALWAYS GENEROUS

T
he scientific literature on the effects of damage to the prefrontal cortex was vast. Its existence bespoke a variety and quantity of human suffering that was horrible to contemplate, but never mind; it was rehearsed here in the course of attempting to reduce that suffering. Among the cases discussed were traumas so much worse than what Frank had experienced that he felt chastened, abashed, lucky, frightened. He wasn’t even sure his brain had been injured. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t just a broken nose and the taste of blood at the back of his throat. Not much compared to an iron spike through the skull.

Nevertheless it was his injury, and how he felt about it was now also part of the symptomatology, because emotions were generated or coordinated or felt in the prefrontal cortex, and so the precise kind of emotional change experienced was an indication of what trauma might have occurred. The dysfunction could be very precise and limited: some subjects were rendered incapable of compassion or embarrassment but could still feel happiness or fear, others felt no dismay or even laughed at crippling disabilities they were quite aware of, and so on. Trauma victims thus became in effect experiments, testing what happened if you removed parts of a very complex system.

Frank clicked and read apprehensively, reminding himself that knowledge was power. “Fear and Anxiety: possible roles of the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis.” “Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala.” The amygdala was behind the nose, a little distance in. A famous case of short-term amnesia had been nicked in the amygdala when a fencing foil went in through his nose.

“Emotion: an evolutionary byproduct of the neural regulation of the autonomic nervous system.” The sociobiological view, for once of less interest to Frank. He would come back to that later. “Reciprocal limbic-cortical functioning and decision-making: converging PET findings in lack of affect and indecision.” “Neuroanatomical correlates of happiness, sadness, and decisiveness.” Both studies of the emotion/decision connection. “Subgenual prefrontal cortex abnormalities in mood disorders.” A study of a case who was unusually wild and incompetent in life decisions, unlike anyone else in her family, and then they remembered that when she was an infant a car had run over her head.

“From the nose to the brain.” Oh my; there were synapses that ran from one end of the head to the other. They went from the nose to everywhere. Scent, memory, behaviors associated with pleasure. These tapped into dopamine that was made available in the nucleus accumbens in the basal forebrain, behind the back of the mouth. This availability depended on a long biochemical sequence functioning well at every point.

The right frontal cortices were more associated with negative emotions than the left; the right somatosensory cortices were active in integrating body management, which might be why they were the apparent seat of empathy. Blocking oxytocin in a female prairie vole did not interfere with its sex drive, but with the attachment to its partner that would usually correlate to sex. Suppressing vasopressin had the same effect on male voles, who would normally be faithful for life, voles being monogamous. You needed both the insula and the anterior cingulate working well to be able to experience joy. Fluency of ideation increased with joy, decreased with sorrow. The brain was often flooded with endogenous opioid peptides such as endomorphines, enkephalin, dynorphin, endorphins—all painkillers. You needed those. Brain systems that supported ethical behaviors were probably not dedicated to ethics exclusively, but rather also to biological regulation, memory, decision-making, and creativity. In other words, to everything. You needed joy to function well. In fact, it appeared that competent or successful decision-making depended on full capability in all the emotions; and these in turn depended on a healthy prefrontal cortex.

It looked to Frank like all the new research was adding up to a new understanding of the roles played by the various elements of human thought, consciousness, behavior; a new model or paradigm, in which emotion and feeling were finally understood to be indispensable in the process of proper reasoning. Decision-making in particular was a reasoning process in which the outcomes of various possible solutions were judged in terms of how they might
feel.
Without that, the ability to decide well was crippled. This was Damasio’s main point: the definition of reason as a process that abjured all emotion had been wrong. Descartes and most of Western philosophy since the Greeks had been wrong. It was the
feel
one was looking for.

Judging from the evolutionary history of the brain, it seemed clear that feelings had entered the picture in prehuman species, as part of social behaviors. Sympathy, attachment, embarrassment, pride, submission, censure and recompense, disgust (at cheaters), altruism, compassion; these were social feelings, and arrived early on, perhaps before language and the “string of sentences” that often seemed to constitute conscious thought. And they were perhaps more important, as overall cognitive strategy was formed by unconscious mentation in regions such as the ventromedial frontal lobe (right behind the nose). Life was feeling one’s way toward a goal which ultimately equated to achieving and maintaining certain feelings.

So an excess of reason was indeed a form of madness! Just as Rudra Cakrin had said in his lecture. It was something the Buddhist tradition had discovered early on, by way of introspection and analysis alone. A kind of science, a natural history.

Which was impressive, but Frank found himself comforted to have the assertion backed by scientific research and a neurological explanation. Or some first hypotheses concerning explanations. For one thing it was a chance to come at the problem in a fresh way, with new data. Buddhist thinkers, and those in the Western philosophical tradition who used introspection and logic alone to postulate “how the mind works,” had been mulling over the same data for five thousand years, and now seemed caught up in preconceptions, distinctions, and semantic hairsplitting of all kinds. Introspection did not give them the means to investigate unconscious thought; and unconscious thought was proving to be crucial. Even consciousness, standing there in the mirror to be looked at (maybe)—even what could be introspected or deduced was so extremely complex, and distributed through so many different parts of the parcellated brain, that you could not think your way through it. It needed a group effort, working on the physical action inside the object itself. It needed science.

And now science was using new tools to move beyond its first achievements in taxonomy and basic function; it was getting into analysis of evidence collected from living minds, from brains both healthy and damaged. It was a huge effort, involving many labs and scientists, and still involved in the process of paradigm construction. Some academic philosophers cast scorn on the simplicity of these researchers’ early models, but to Frank it was better than continuing to elaborate theories generated by the evidence of introspection alone. Obviously there was still far to go, but until you took the first steps you would never be on the way.

It was noticeable that the Dalai Lama always welcomed the new results from brain science. It would help Buddhists to refine their own beliefs, he said; it was the obvious thing to do. And it was true that many academic philosophers interested in consciousness also welcomed the new findings.

Welcomed or not, all the papers from the new body of work were accumulating on the net. And so Frank lay there in bed, reading them on his laptop, unable to figure out what he felt, or what he should do next, or if he might have a physical problem. Damasio, a leader in this new research: “The system is so complex and multilayered that it operates with some degree of freedom.” Oh yes, he was free, no doubt of that—but was he damaged? What did he feel? What was this feeling, like oceans of clouds in his chest? And what should he do next?

THE KHEMBALI HOUSE IN ARLINGTON WAS just as crowded as Frank had thought it would be, maybe even more so. It was a big house, perhaps built to be a boarding house from the start, with a ground floor of big public rooms and three floors of bedrooms above, many of them off long central hallways, and an extensive basement. But as a good percentage of the Khembali populace was being housed in these rooms, all of them were overflowing.

Clearly it would be best if he continued to live out of his van, using the bathrooms at NSF and Optimodal. But his Khembali friends were adamant in their invitation.

Sucandra said, “Please, Frank. Join Rudra Cakrin in his room. No one else will move in there, and yet he needs someone. And he likes you.”

“Doesn’t he like everybody?”

Sucandra and Padma regarded each other.

“Rudra was the oracle,” Padma told Frank.

“So?”

Sucandra said, “It seems one old Bön spirit that used to visit him comes back from time to time.”

“Also,” Padma added, “he seems to feel we have lost Tibet. Or failed to recover it. He doesn’t think he will see it again in this life. It makes him . . .”

“Irritable.”

“Angry.”

“Perhaps a little mad.”

“He does not blame you for any of this, however.”

“To him you represent another chance for Tibet.”

“No, he just likes you. He knows the situation with Tibet is hopeless, at least for some time to come.”

An exile. Frank had never been an exile in the formal sense, and never would be; but living on the East Coast had given him a profound sense of not being at home. Bioregional displacement, one might say; and for a long time he had hated this place. Only in the last year had the forest begun to teach him how it could be loved. And if the great eastern hardwood forest had repelled him, how much more might it repel a man from the treeless roof of the world? Who could never go home?

So Frank felt he understood that part of Rudra’s moodiness. The visiting demon, however . . . Well, these were religious people. They weren’t the only religious people Frank knew. It should resemble talking to Baptists, and he had gotten used to that. It was just another worldview in which the cosmos was filled with invisible agents, intervening in human affairs.

He could always focus on the shared pain of displacement. Besides, Sucandra and Padma were asking for his help.

So that night Drepung took him in to see Rudra Cakrin, in a tiny room off the stair landing before the flight to the attic, a space that might once have been a closet. There was only room for a single bed and a slot between it and the wall.

Rudra was sitting up in bed. He had been ill, and looked much older than Frank had ever seen him. “Please to see you,” he said, peering up at him as they shook hands. “You are my new English teacher, Drepung say. You teach me English, I teach you Tibetan.”

“That would be good,” Frank said.

“Very good. My English better than your Tibetan.” He smiled, his face folding into its map of laugh wrinkles. “I don’t know how we fit two beds in here.”

“I can unroll a groundpad down here,” Frank suggested. “Take it up by day.”

“Good idea. You don’t mind sleep on floor?”

“I’ve been sleeping in a tree.”

Startled, Rudra refocused on Frank. Again the strange intensity of his gaze; he looked right into you. And who else had Frank told about his tree house? No one but Caroline.

“Good idea!” Rudra said. “One thing right away—I cannot be, what say—guru for you.”

“That’s okay, I already have a guru. He teaches me frisbee.”

“Good idea.”

Afterward Frank said to Drepung, “He seems fine to me.”

“So you will share a room with him?”

“Whatever you like. I’m your guest. You decide.”

“Thank you. I think it will be good for both of you.”

There was no denying that Frank felt deeply uneasy about moving indoors, as if he were breaking a promise to someone. A kind of guilt, but more importantly a profound physical unease, a tightness in the chest, a numbness in the head. But it was more all-encompassing than that.

On waking in the mornings he would get up from his groundpad in Rudra’s room, roll it up, stick it under Rudra’s bed, go downstairs and out the door, almost sick to his stomach with anxiety. Shivering in the driver’s seat of his van, he would wake up the rest of the way, then drive over to Optimodal, getting there just as they unlocked the doors. Diane was often already there waiting, slapping her mittened hands together. She always had a cheery smile to greet him. He found her consistency impressive. Sometimes his smile in response must have looked wan indeed. And in fact she sometimes put a hand to his arm and asked if he were all right. He always nodded. Yes; all right. Not good not bad. Not anything he could define. Nose still stuffed up, yes, but otherwise okay. Ready to go.

And in they would go, for a workout that now had the two of them wandering semi-autonomously; they had got past feeling they needed to team up to be friendly, and merely did their own things in such an order that they were often in the same room, and could sometimes talk, or help out with weights or holding ankles. Then it was off to the showers and the daily blessing of hot water running over him. Presumably on the other side of the wall Diane was doing the same under a shower of her own. By now Frank could visualize pretty well what Diane would look like. She would look good. Probably this didn’t matter. It only made him worry about Caroline and what might have happened to her.