Forty Signs of Rain (26 page)

“How was your day?” Charlie said.

“I fixed a data error all day long.”

“That’s good dear.”

She gave him a look. “I swore I wasn’t going to do it,” she said darkly, “but I just couldn’t bring myself to ignore it.”

“No, I’m sure you couldn’t.”

He kept a straight face, but she punched him on the arm anyway. “Smartass. Is there any beer in the fridge?”

“I think so.”

She hunted for one. “There was some good news that came in, did you see that? I forwarded it. The Khembalis got a couple of grants.”

“Really! That is good news.” He was sniffing at a yellow curry bubbling in the frying pan.

“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 use pepper. 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 the 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.

A
NOTHER 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 very much yes, just like this in Delhi, actually it would be a blessing if it were to be like this in Delhi, it would be a great improvement over what they have now, third year of drought you see, they are needing the monsoon to be coming 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. It had come off near a Roosevelt Island, a low black rock that had been buried under the ice and known only to radar probes, and so was exposed to the air for the first time in either two or fifteen million years, depending on which research team you
believed. Although it might not be exposed for long; 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, and therefore moving faster than ever.

This accelerated flow of ice toward the sea had big ramifications. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet was much bigger than the Ross Ice Shelf, and had been resting on ground that was below sea level but that held the ice much higher than it would have been if it had been floating freely in the ocean. So when it broke up and sailed away, it would displace more ocean water than it had before.

Charlie read on, feeling somewhat 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. As the sheet broke away, they said, seawater was lifting the edges of the ice still resting on the bottom, deeper and deeper at every tide, tugging with every current, and thus beginning to tear the sheet apart in big vertical cracks, and launch it out to sea.

Charlie checked this 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. Modeling inconclusive because the sea bottom under the grounded ice irregular, they said, with active volcanoes under it, so who knew? But it very well might happen fast.

Charlie heard in their voices the kind of repressed delirium of scientific excitement that he had heard once or twice 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 about seven meters. “This could happen fast,” one glaciologist emphasized, “and I’m not talking geology fast here, I’m talking tide fast. A matter of several years in some simulations.” The hard thing to pinpoint was whether it would start to accelerate
or not. 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. They were all bad. 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. Meaning everyone. Charlie had done enough research on the tidal power stuff, and other coastal issues, to give him a sharpened sense that this was serious, and perhaps the tipping point into something worse. All of a sudden it coalesced into a clear vision standing before him, and what he saw frightened him. Twenty percent of humanity lived on the coast. 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 the ordinary summer day. As if the sensation of heat hit an upper limit where it just blurred out. Joe was seatbelted 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. “Resistance is futile!”

They took the elevators in the Metro stations and came up on the Mall, to stroll over to Phil’s office in the old carpenters’ union. 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. But once again he resolved to quit eating boiled lobsters. It would be a bad way to go.

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 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 CO
₂
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)—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 felt that at this late point it was better to stick to that plan. He added language to make the revisions Phil wanted, pushing the envelope in each case, as it seemed now, if ever, 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, all the more reason to get it precise and smooth, armored against attack, low-keyed and unobjectionable, invisibly effective. 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, and then you don’t get the evaporative cooling. And I keep my head above it,” banging the wall with the back of his noggin, “so I don’t catch as many a-c colds. I learned that a long time ago, when I was stationed on Okinawa.”

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. The President’s favorite toddler.”

“It’s not Joe that’s getting to me, it’s you. You and the rest of the Senate. This is it, Phil—the current situation
requires
a response that is more than business as usual. And that’s worrying me, because you guys are only geared to 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? There’s a certain accountability to it. So if you have a better way of doing it you tell me. But please, 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 Corps of Engineers. The magnifying glass is the GAO, and this, what is it, like 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, 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.”

In the days that followed, 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 to express the process: “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 things or nothing would proceed. No precisely spelled-out 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 Beeker from the Muppets, haplessly struggling with the round top-hatted guy from the Monopoly game. Right now Beeker was getting his butt kicked.