Forty Signs of Rain (39 page)

His phone rang and he jumped a foot.

“Hello!”

“Charlie! Are you all right?”

“Hi babe, yeah, you just startled me.”

“Sorry, oh good. I was worried, I heard on the news that downtown is flooding, the Mall is flooding.”

“The what?”

“Are you at the office?”

“Yeah.”

“Is anyone else there with you?”

“Sure.”

“Are they just sitting there working?”

Charlie peered out of his carrel door to look. In fact his floor sounded empty. It sounded as if everyone was gathered down in Evelyn’s office.

“I’ll go check and call you back,” he said to Anna.

“Okay call me when you find out what’s happening!”

“I will. Thanks for tipping me. Hey before I go, did you know that Khembalung is a kind of reincarnation of Shambhala?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Shambhala, the hidden magical city—”

“Yes I know—”

“—well it’s a kind of movable feast, apparently. Whenever it’s discovered, or the time is right, it moves on to a new spot. They recently found the ruins of the original one in Kashgar, did you know that?”

“No.”

“Apparently they did. It was like finding Troy, or the Atlantis place on Santorini. But Shambhala didn’t end in Kashgar, it moved. First to Tibet, then to a valley in east Nepal or west Bhutan, a valley called Khembalung. I suppose when the Chinese conquered Tibet they had to move it down to that island.”

“How do you know this?”

“I just read it online.”

“Charlie that’s very nice, but right now go find out what’s going on down there in your office! I think you’re in the area that may get flooded!”

“Okay, I will. But look”—walking down the hall now—“did Drepung ever talk to you about how they figure out who their reincarnated lamas have been reborn as?”

“No! Go check on your office!”

“Okay I am, but look honey, I want you to talk to him about that. I’m remembering that first dinner when the old man was playing games with Joe and his blocks, and Sucandra didn’t like it.”

“So?”

“So I just want to be sure that nothing’s going on there! This is serious, honey, I’m serious. Those folks looking for the new Panchen Lama got some poor little kid in terrible trouble a few years ago, and I don’t want any part of anything like that.”

“What? I don’t know what you’re talking about Charlie, but let’s talk about it later. Just find out what’s going on there.”

“Okay okay, but remember.”

“I will!”

“Okay. Call you back in a second.”

He went into Evelyn’s office and saw people jammed around the south window, with another group around a TV set on a desk.

“Look at this,” Andrea said to him, gesturing at the TV screen.

“Is that our door camera?” Charlie exclaimed, recognizing the view down Constitution. “That’s our door camera!”

“That’s right.”

“My God!”

Charlie went to the window and stood on his tiptoes to see past people. The Mall was covered by water. The streets beyond were flooded. Constitution was floored by water that looked to be at least two feet deep, maybe deeper.

“Incredible isn’t it.”

“Shit!”

“Look at that.”

“Will you look at that!”

“Why didn’t you guys call me?” Charlie cried, shocked by the view.

“Forgot you were here,” someone said. “You’re never here.”

Andrea added, “It just came up in the last half hour, or even less. It happened all at once, it seemed like. I was watching.” Her voice quivered. “It was like a hard downburst, and the raindrops didn’t have anywhere to go, they were splashing into a big puddle everywhere, and then it was there, what you see.”

“A big puddle everywhere.”

Constitution Avenue looked like the Grand Canal in Venice. Beyond
it the Mall was like a rainbeaten lake. Water sheeted equally over streets, sidewalks and lawns. Charlie recalled the shock he had felt many years before, leaving the Venice train station and seeing the canal right there outside the door. A city floored with water. Here it was quite shallow, of course. But the front steps of all the buildings came down into an expanse of brown water, and the water was all at one level, as with any other lake or sea. Brown-blue, blue-brown, brown-gray, brown, gray, dirty white—drab urban tints all. The rain pocked it into an infinity of rings and bounding droplets, and gusts of wind tore cats’ paws across it.

Charlie maneuvered closer to the window as people left it. It seemed to him then that the water in the distance was flowing gently toward them; for a moment it looked (and even felt) as if their building had cast anchor and was steaming westward. Charlie felt a lurch in his stomach, put his hand to the windowsill to keep his balance.

“Shit, I should get home,” he said.

“How are you going to do that?”

“We’ve been advised to stay put,” Evelyn said.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I mean, take a look. It could be dangerous out there right now. That’s nothing to mess with—look at that!” A little electric car floated or rather was dragged down the street, already tipped on its side. “You could get knocked off your feet.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

Charlie wasn’t quite convinced, but he didn’t want to argue. The water was definitely a couple of feet deep, and the rain was shattering its surface. If nothing else, it was too weird to go out.

“How extensive is it?” he asked.

Evelyn switched to a local news channel, where a very cheerful woman was saying that a big tidal surge had been predicted, because the tides were at the height of an eleven-year cycle. She went on to say that this tide was cresting higher than it would have normally because Tropical Storm Sandy’s surge was now pushing up Chesapeake Bay. The combined tidal and storm surges were moving up the Potomac toward
Washington, losing height and momentum all the while, but impeding the outflow of the river, which had a watershed of “fourteen thousand square miles” as Charlie had heard in the Iranian deli—a watershed which had that morning experienced record-shattering rainfall. In the last four hours ten inches of rain had fallen in several widely separated parts of the watershed, and now all that was pouring downstream and encountering the tidal bore, right in the metropolitan area. The four inches of rain that had fallen on Washington during its midday squall, while spectacular in itself, had only added to the larger problem; for the moment, there was nowhere for any of the water to go. All this the reporter explained with a happy smile.

Outside, the rain was falling no more violently than during many a summer evening’s shower. But it was coming down steadily, and striking water when it hit.

“Amazing,” Andrea said.

“I hope this washes the International Monetary Fund away.”

This remark opened the floodgates, so to speak, on a loud listing of all the buildings and agencies the people in the room most wanted to see wiped off the face of the earth. Someone shouted “the Capitol,” but of course it was located on its hill to the east of them, high ground that stayed high for a good distance to the east before dipping down to the Anacostia. The people up there probably wouldn’t even get stranded, as there should be a strip of high ground running to the east and north.

Unlike them, situated below the Capitol by about forty vertical feet:

“We’re here for a while.”

“The trains will be stopped for sure.”

“What about the Metro? Oh my God.”

“I’ve gotta call home.”

Several people said this at once, Charlie among them. People scattered to their desks and their phones. Charlie said, “Phone, get me Anna.”

He got a quick reply: “All circuits are busy. Please try again.” This was a recording he hadn’t heard in many years, and it gave him a bad start. Of course it would happen now if at any time, everyone would be trying to
call someone, and lines would be down. But what if it stayed like that for hours—or days? Or even longer? It was a sickening thought; he felt hot, and the itchiness blazed anew across his broken skin. He was almost overcome by something like dizziness, as if some invisible limb were being threatened with immediate amputation—his sixth sense, in effect, which was his link to Anna. All of a sudden he understood how completely he took his state of permanent communication with her for granted. They talked a dozen times a day, and he relied on those talks to know what he was doing, sometimes literally.

Now he was cut off from her. Judging by the voices in the offices, no one’s connection was working. They regathered; had anyone gotten an open line? No. Was there an emergency phone system they could tap into? No.

There was, however, e-mail. Everyone sat down at their keyboards to type out messages home, and for a while it was like an office of secretaries or telegraph operators.

After that there was nothing to do but watch screens, or look out windows. They did that, milling about restlessly, saying the same things over and over, trying the phones, typing, looking out the windows or checking out the channels and sites. The usual news channels’ helicopter shots and all other overhead views lower than satellite level were impossible in the violence of the storm, but almost every channel had cobbled together or transferred direct images from various cameras around town, and one of the weather stations was flying drone camera balloons and blimps into the storm and showing whatever it was they got, mostly swirling gray clouds, but also astonishing shots of the surrounding countryside as vast tree- or roof-studded lakes. One camera on top of the Washington Monument gave a splendid view of the extent of the flooding around the Mall, truly breathtaking. The Potomac had almost overrun Roosevelt Island, and spilled over its banks until it disappeared into the huge lake it was forming, thus onto the Mall and all the way across it, up to the steps of the White House and the Capitol, both on little knolls, the Capitol’s well higher. The entirety of the little Southwest district was floored by water, though its big buildings stood clear; the broad valley of
the Anacostia looked like a reservoir. The city south of Pennsylvania Avenue was a building-studded lake.

And not just there. The flood had filled Rock Creek to the top of its deep but narrow ravine, and now water was pouring over at the sharp bends the gorge took while dropping through the city to the Potomac. Cameras on the bridges at M Street caught the awesome sight of the creek roaring around its final turn west, upstream from M Street, and pouring over Francis Junior High School and straight south on 23rd Street into Foggy Bottom, joining the lake covering the Mall.

Then on to a different channel, a different camera. The Watergate Building was indeed a curving water gate, like a remnant portion of a dam. The wave-tossed spate of the Potomac poured around its big bend looking as if it could knock the building down. Likewise the Kennedy Center just south of it. The Lincoln Memorial, despite its pedestal mound, appeared to be flooded up to about Lincoln’s feet. Across the Potomac the water was going to inundate the lower levels of Arlington National Cemetery. Reagan Airport was completely gone.

“Unbelievable.”

Charlie went back to the view out their window. The water was still there. A voice on the TV was saying something about a million acre-feet of water converging in the metropolitan area, partially blocked in its flow downstream by the high tide. With more rain predicted.

Out the window Charlie saw that people were already taking to the streets around them in small watercraft, despite the wind and drizzle. Zodiacs, kayaks, a waterski boat, canoes, rowboats; he saw examples of them all. Then as the evening wore on, and the dim light left the air below the black clouds, the rain returned with its earlier intensity. It poured down in a way that surely made it dangerous to be on the water. Most of the small craft had appeared to be occupied by men who it did not seem had any good reason to be out there. Out for a lark—thrill-seekers, already!

“It looks like Venice,” Andrea said, echoing Charlie’s earlier thought. “I wonder what it would be like if it were like this all the time.”

“Maybe we’ll get to find out.”

“How high above sea level are we here?”

No one knew, but Evelyn quickly found and clicked a topographical map to her screen. They jammed around her to look at it, or to get the address to bring it up on their own screens.

“Look at that.”

“Ten feet above sea level? Can that be true?”

“That’s why they call it the Tidal Basin.”

“But isn’t the ocean like what, fifty miles away? A hundred?”

“Ninety miles downstream to Chesapeake Bay,” Evelyn said.

“I wonder if the Metro has flooded.”

“How could it not?”

“True. I suppose it must have in some places.”

“And if in some places, wouldn’t it spread?”

“Well, there are higher and lower sections. Seems like the lower ones would for sure. And anywhere the entries are flooded.”

“Well, yes.”

“Wow. What a mess.”

“Shit, I got here by Metro.”

Charlie said, “Me too.”

They thought about that for a while. Taxis weren’t going to be running either.

“I wonder how long it takes to walk home.”

But then again, Rock Creek ran between the Mall and Bethesda.

Hours passed. Charlie checked his e-mail frequently, and finally there was a note from Anna:
we’re fine here glad to hear you’re set in the office, be sure to stay there until it’s safe, let’s talk as soon as the phones will get through love, A and boys

Charlie took a deep breath, feeling greatly reassured. When the topo map had come up he had checked Bethesda first, and found that the border of the District and Maryland at Wisconsin Avenue was some two hundred and fifty feet above sea level. And Rock Creek was well to the east of it. Little Falls Creek was closer, but far enough to the west not to
be a concern, he hoped. Of course Wisconsin Avenue itself was probably a shallow stream of sorts now, running down into Georgetown—and wouldn’t it be great if snobbish little Georgetown got some of this, but wouldn’t you know it, it was on a rise overlooking the river, in the usual correlation of money and elevation. Higher than the Capitol by a good deal. It was always that way; the poor people lived down in the flats, as witness the part of Southeast in the valley of the Anacostia River, now flooded from one side to the other.