Forty Signs of Rain (37 page)

“Oh I see! Well good! Good for you.”

“Yeah, well. Atlanta.”

There was a whistle from the Army guys. A whole gang of Leucadians were trooping behind them down Neptune, south to another dump truck that had just arrived. There was more to be done.

Leo and Marta and Brian followed, went back to work. Some people left, others arrived. Lots of people were documenting events on video cameras and digital cameras. As the day wore on, the volunteers were glad to take heavy-duty work gloves from the Army guys to protect their palms from further blistering.

About two that afternoon the three of them decided to call it quits. Their palms were trashed. Leo’s thighs and lower back were getting shaky, and he was hungry. The cliff work would go on, and there would be no shortage of volunteers while the storm lasted. The need was evident, and besides it was fun to be out in the blast, doing something. Working made it seem like a practical contribution to be out there, although many would have been out to watch in any case.

The three of them stood on a point just north of Swami’s, leaning into the storm and marveling at the spectacle. Marta was bouncing a little in place, stuffed with energy still, totally fired up; she seemed both exhilarated and furious, and shouted at the biggest waves when they struck the stubborn little cliff at Pipes. “Wow! Look at that. Outside, outside!” She was soaking wet, as they all were, the rain plastering her curls to her head, the wind plastering her shirt to her torso; she looked like the winner of some kind of extreme-sport wet T-shirt contest, her breasts and belly button and ribs and collarbones and abs all perfectly delineated under the thin wet cloth. She was a power, a San Diego surf goddess, and good for her that she had gotten hired by Small Delivery Systems. Again Leo felt a glow for this wild young colleague of his.

“This is so great,” he shouted. “I’d rather do this than work in the lab!”

Brian laughed. “They don’t pay you for this, Leo.”

“Ah hey. Fuck that. This is still better.” And he howled at the storm.

Then Brian and Marta gave him hugs; they were taking off.

“Let’s try to stay in touch you guys,” Leo said sentimentally. “Let’s really do it. Who knows, we may all end up working together again someday anyway.”

“Good idea.”

“I’ll probably be available,” Brian said.

Marta shrugged, looking away. “We either will be or we won’t.”

Then they were off. Leo waved at Marta’s receding truck. A sudden pang—would he ever see them again? The reflection of the truck’s tail-lights smeared in two red lines over the street’s wet asphalt. Blinking right turn signal—then they were gone.

I
t takes no great skill to decode the world system today. A tiny percentage of the population is immensely wealthy, some are well off, a lot are just getting by, a lot more are suffering. We call it capitalism, but within it lies buried residual patterns of feudalism and older hierarchies, basic injustices framing the way we organize ourselves. Everybody lives in an imaginary relationship to this real situation; and that is our world. We walk with scales on our eyes, and only see what we think
.

And all the while on a sidewalk over the abyss. There are islands of time when things seem stable. Nothing much happens but the rounds of the week. Later the islands break apart. When enough time has passed, no one now alive will still be here; everyone will be different. Then it will be the stories that will link the generations, history and DNA, long chains of the simplest bits—guanine, adenine, cytosine, thymine—love, hope, fear, selfishness—all recombining again and again, until a miracle happens

and the organism springs forth!

C
HARLIE, AWAKENED by the sound of a loud alarm, leapt to his feet and stood next to his bed, hands thrown out like a nineteenth-century boxer.

“What?” he shouted at the loud noise.

It was not an alarm. It was Joe in the room, wailing. He stared at his father amazed. “Ba.”

“Jesus, Joe.” The itchiness began to burn across Charlie’s chest and arms. He had tossed and turned in misery most of the night, as he had every night since encountering the poison ivy. He had probably fallen asleep only an hour or two before. “What time is it. Joe, it’s not even seven! Don’t
yell
like that. All you have to do is tap me on the shoulder if I’m asleep, and say, ‘Good morning Dad, can you warm up a bottle for me?’ ”

Joe approached and tapped his leg, staring peacefully at him. “Mo Da. Wa ba.”

“Wow Joe. Really good! Say, I’ll get your bottle warmed up right away! Very good! Hey listen, have you pooped in your diaper yet? You might want to pull it down and sit on
your own toilet
in the bathroom like a big boy, poop like Nick and then come on down to the kitchen and your bottle will be ready. Doesn’t that sound good?”

“Ga Da.” Joe trundled off toward the bathroom.

Charlie, amazed, padded after Joe and descended the stairs as gently as he could, hoping not to stimulate his itches. In the kitchen the air was delightfully cool and silky. Nick was there reading a book. Without looking up he said, “I want to go down to the park and play.”

“I thought you had homework to do.”

“Well, sort of. But I want to play.”

“Why don’t you do your homework first and then play, that way when you play you’ll be able to really enjoy it.”

Nick cocked his head. “That’s true. Okay, I’ll go do my homework first.” He slipped out, book under his arm.

“Oh, and take your shoes up to your room while you’re on your way.”

“Sure Dad.”

Charlie stared at his reflection in the side of the stove hood. His eyes were round.

“Hmm,” he said. He got Joe’s bottle in its pot, stuck an earphone in his left ear. “Phone, give me Phil.… Hello, Phil, look I wanted to catch you while the thought was fresh, I was thinking that if only we tried to introduce the Chinese aerosols bill again, then we could catch the whole air problem at a kind of fulcrum point and either start a process that would finish with the coal plants here on the East Coast, or else it would serve as a stalking horse, see what I mean?”

“So you’re saying we go after the Chinese again?”

“Well yeah, but as part of your whole package of efforts.”

“And then it either works or it doesn’t work, but gives us some leverage we can use elsewhere? Hmm, good idea Charlie, I’d forgotten that bill, but it was a good one. I’ll give that a try. Call Roy and tell him to get it ready.”

“Sure Phil, consider it done.”

Charlie took the bottle out of the pot and dried it. Joe appeared in the door, naked, holding up his diaper for Charlie’s inspection.

“Wow Joe, very good! You pooped in your toilet? Very, very good, here’s your bottle all ready, what a perfect kind of Pavlovian reward.”

Joe snatched the bottle from Charlie’s hand and waddled off, a length of toilet paper trailing behind him, one end stuck between the halves of his butt.

Holy shit, Charlie thought. So to speak.

He called up Roy and told him Phil had authorized the reintroduction of the Chinese bill. Roy was incredulous. “What do you mean, we went down big-time on that, it was a joke then and it would be worse now!”

“No not so, it lost bad but that was good, we got lots of credit for it that we deployed elsewhere, and it’ll happen the same way when we do it again because it’s
right
, Roy, we have right on our side on this.”

“Yes of course obviously that’s not the point—”

“Not the point, have we gotten so jaded that being right is no longer relevant?”

“No of course not, but that’s not the point either, it’s like playing a chess game, each move is just a move in the larger game, you know?”

“Yes I do know because that’s my analogy, but that’s my point, this is a good move, this checks them, they have to give up a queen to stop from being checkmated.”

“You really think it’s that much leverage? Why?”

“Because Winston has such ties to Chinese industry, and he can’t defend that very well to his hard-core constituency, Christian
realpolitik
isn’t really a supercoherent philosophy and so it’s a
vulnerability
he has don’t you see?”

“Well yeah, of course. You said Phil okayed it already?”

“Yes he did.”

“Okay, that’s good enough for me.”

Charlie got off and did a little dance in the kitchen, circling out into the living room, where Joe was sitting on the floor trying to get back into his diaper. Both adhesive tags had torn loose. “Good try Joe, here let me help you.”

“Okay Da.” Joe held out the diaper.

“Hmm,” Charlie said, suddenly suspicious.

He called up Anna and got her. “Hey snooks, how are you, yeah I’m just calling to say I love you and to suggest that we get tickets to fly to Jamaica,
we’ll find some kind of kid care and go down there just by ourselves, we’ll rent a whole beach to ourselves and spend a week down there or maybe two, it would be good for us.”

“True.”

“It’s really inexpensive down there now because of the unrest and all, so we’ll have it all to ourselves almost.”

“True.”

“So I’ll just call up the travel agent and have them put it all on my business-expenses card.”

“Okay, go for it.”

Then there was a kind of cracking sound and Charlie woke up for real.

“Ah shit.”

He knew just what had happened, because it had happened before. His dreaming mind had grown skeptical at something in a dream that was going too well or badly—in this case his implausibly powerful persuasiveness—and so he had dreamed up ever-more-unlikely scenarios, in a kind of test-to-destruction, until the dream had popped and he had awakened.

It was almost funny, this relationship to dreams. Except sometimes they crashed at the most inopportune moments. It was perverse to probe the limits of believability rather than just go with the flow, but that was the way Charlie’s mind worked, apparently. Nothing he could do about it but groan and laugh, and try to train his sleeping mind into a more wish fulfillment–tolerant response.

It turned out that in the real world it was a work-at-home day for Anna, scheduled to give Charlie a kind of poison ivy vacation from Joe. Charlie was planning to take advantage of that to go down to the office by himself for once, and have a talk with Phil about what to do next. It was crucial to get Phil on line for a set of small bills that would save the best of the comprehensive.

He padded downstairs to find Anna cooking pancakes for the boys. Joe liked to use them as little frisbees. “Morning babe.”

“Hi hon.” He kissed her on the ear, inhaling the smell of her hair. “I just had the most amazing dream. I could talk anybody into anything.”

“How exactly was that a dream?”

“Yeah right! Don’t tease me about that, obviously I can’t talk anybody into anything. No, this was definitely a dream. In fact I pushed it too far and killed it. I tried to talk you into going off with me to Jamaica, and you said yes.”

She laughed merrily at the thought, and he laughed to see her laugh, and at the memory of the dream. And then it seemed like a gift instead of a mockery.

He scanned the kitchen computer screen for the news.
Stormy Monday
, it proclaimed. Big storms were swirling up out of the subtropics, and the freshly minted blue of the Arctic Ocean was dotted by a daisy chain of white patches, all falling south. The highest satellite photos, covering most of the Northern Hemisphere, reminded Charlie of how his skin had looked right after his outbreak of poison ivy. A huge white blister had covered Southern California the day before; another was headed their way from Canada, this one a real bruiser—big, wet, slightly warmer than usual, pouring down on them from Saskatchewan.

The media meteorologists were already in a lather of anticipation and analysis, not only over the arctic blast but also in response to a tropical storm now leaving the Bahamas, even though it had wreaked less damage than had been predicted.

“ ‘Unimpressive,’ this guy calls it. My God! Everybody’s a critic. Now people are
reviewing the weather.”