Sixty Days and Counting (48 page)

He chuckled briefly, but with the same shadowed expression as before—grim, or pained. Anna had spoken from the very start of a look she had seen on Drepung’s face that pierced her, but Charlie had not seen it until now.

“So,” he said, “you are the Panchen Lama. Holy shit.”

“Yes.”

“So that’s why you’ve been laying low in the embassy and all. Office boy or receptionist or whatnot.”

“Yes, that’s right. And indeed you must not tell anyone.”

“Oh no, we won’t.”

“So your real name is…”

“Gedhun Choekyi Nyima.”

“And Drepung?”

“Drepung is the name of one of the big monasteries in Tibet. It is not actually a person’s name. But I like it.”

They drifted downriver for a while.

“So let me get this straight!” Charlie said. “Everything you guys told us when you came here was wrong! You, the office boy, are actually the head man. Your supposed head man turned out to have been a minor servant, like a press secretary. And your monk regents are some kind of a gay couple.”

“Well, that’s about right,” Drepung said. “Although I don’t think of Padma and Sucandra as a gay couple.”

Frank said, “I don’t mean to stereotype anyone, but I lived in the room next to them for a few months, and, you know, they are definitely what-have-you. Companions.”

“Yes, of course. They shared a prison cell for ten years. They are very close. But…” Drepung shrugged. He was thinking about other things. Again the tightened mouth, with its undercurrent of anger. And of course it would be there—how could it not? Once Drepung had said to Charlie that his parents were no longer living; presumably, then, he had reason to believe that the Chinese had killed them. Perhaps the search for him had made this clear. Charlie didn’t want to ask about it.

“What about the other Panchen Lama?” he said. “The boy that the Chinese selected?”

Drepung shrugged. “We are not sure he is still alive. Our informants have not been able to find him in the way they found me. So he is missing. Someone said, if he is alive, they will bring him up stupid.”

Charlie shook his head. It was ugly stuff. Not that it didn’t fit right in with centuries of bitter Chinese-Tibetan intrigue, ranging from propaganda attacks to full-on war—and now, for the previous half century, a kind of slow-motion genocide, as the Tibetans were both killed outright, and overwhelmed in their own land by millions of Han colonials. The amazing thing was that the Tibetan response had been as nonviolent as it had been. Maybe a full-on terrorist campaign or an insurrection would indeed have gotten them farther. But the means really were the ends for these guys. That was actually kind of an amazing thought, Charlie found. He supposed it was because of the Dalai Lama, or because of their Buddhist culture, if that wasn’t saying the same thing; they had enough of a shared belief system that they could agree that going the route of violence would have meant losing even if they had won. They would get there on their own terms, if they could. And so Drepung had been snatched out of captivity with a kind of Israeli or Mission Impossible deftness, and now here he was, out in the world. Taking the stage in front of 13,000 people with the Dalai Lama himself. How many there had known what they were seeing?

“But Drepung, don’t the Chinese know who you are?”

“Yes. It is pretty clear they do.”

“But you’re not in danger?”

“I don’t think so. They’ve known for a while now. I am a kind of topic in the ongoing negotiations with the Chinese leadership. It’s a new leadership, and they are looking for a solution on this issue. The Dalai Lama is talking to them, and I have been involved too. And now Phil Chase has been made aware of my identity, and certain assurances have been given. I have a kind of diplomatic immunity.”

“I see. And so—what now? Now that the Dalai Lama has been here, and Phil has endorsed his cause too?”

“We go on from that. Parts of the Chinese government are angry now, at us and at Phil Chase. Parts would like the problem to be over. So it is an unstable moment. Negotiations continue.”

“Wow, Drepung.”

Frank said, “Is it okay if we keep calling you that?”

“No, you must call me Your High Holiness.” Drepung grinned at them, slapped a paddle to spray them. Charlie saw that he was happy to be alive, happy to be free. There were problems, there were dangers, but here he was, out on the Potomac. They spread back out and paddled in to shore.

CUT TO THE CHASE

Today’s post:

I’ve been remembering the fear I had. It’s made me think about how a lot of the people in this world have to live with a lot of fear every day. Not acute fear maybe, but chronic, and big. Of course we all live with fear, you can’t avoid it. But still, to be afraid for your kids. To be afraid of getting sick because you don’t have health care. That fear itself makes you sick. That’s fifty million people in our country. That’s a fear we could remove. It seems to me now that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should be removing all the fears that we can. There will always be basic fears we can’t remove—fear of death, fear of loss—but we can do better on removing the fear of destitution, and on our fear for our kids and the world they’ll inherit.

One way we could do that would be to guarantee health insurance. Make it a simple system, like Canada’s or Holland’s or Denmark’s, and make sure everyone has it. That’s well within our ability to fund. All the healthiest countries do it that way. Let’s admit the free market botched this and we need to put our house in order. Health shouldn’t be something that can bankrupt you. It’s not a market commodity. Admitting that and moving on would remove one of the greatest fears of all.

Another thing we could do would be to institute full employment. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people could offer jobs to everyone who wants one. It would be like the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, only more wide-ranging. Because there’s an awful lot of work that needs doing, and we’ve got the resources to get things started. We could do it.

One of the more interesting aspects of full employment as an idea is how quickly it reveals the fear that lies at the heart of our current system. You’ll notice that anytime unemployment drops below 5 percent the stock market begins to flag, because capital has begun to worry that lower unemployment will mean “wage pressure,” meaning management faces a shortage in supply of labor and has to demand it, has to bid for it, pay more in competition, and wages therefore go up—and profits down.

Think for a minute about what that means about the system we’ve agreed to live in. Five percent of our working population is about ten million people. Ten million people out of jobs, and a lot of them therefore homeless and without health insurance. Destitute and hungry. But this is structural, it’s part of the plan. We can’t hire them without big businesses getting scared at the prospect that they might have to compete for labor by offering higher wages and more benefits. So unemployment never dips below 5 percent without having a chilling effect on the market, which depresses new investments and new hiring, and as a result the unemployment rate goes back up. No one has to say anything—it works as if by itself—but the fear keeps being created and profits stay high. People stay hungry and compliant.

So essentially, by these attitudes and responses, big business and stock owners act as a cartel to keep the economy cranking along at a high rate but with unemployment included as an element, so that the bottom wage earners are immiserated and desperate, and the rest of the wage earners will take any job they can get, at any wages, even below a living wage, because that’s so much better than nothing. And so all wage earners and most salary earners are kept under the thumb of capital, and have no leverage to better their deal in the system.

But if government of the people, by the people, and for the people were offering all citizens employment at a real living wage, then private business would have to match that or they wouldn’t be able to get any labor. Supply and demand, baby—and so the bids for labor would get competitive, as they say. That all by itself would raise the income and living standards for about 70 percent of our population faster than any other single move I could think of. The biggest blessing would be for the lowest 30 percent or so—what’s that, a hundred million people? Or could we just say, working America? Or just America?

Of course it’s a global labor market, and so we would need other countries to enact similar programs, but we could work on that. We could take the lead and exert America’s usual heavyweight influence. We could put the arm on countries not in compliance, by keeping out investment capital and so on. Globalization has gotten far enough along that the tools are there to leverage the whole system in various ways. You could leverage it toward justice just as easily as toward extraction and exploitation. In fact it would be easier, because people would like it and support it. I think it’s worth a try. I’m going to go to my advisors and then Congress to discuss it and see what we can do.

Previous post:

People have been asking me what it’s like to get shot. It’s pretty much as you’d expect. It’s bad. It’s not so much the pain, which is too big to feel, you go into shock immediately, at least I did—I’ve hurt more than that stubbing my toe. It’s the fear. I knew I’d been shot and figured I was dying. I thought when I lost consciousness that would be it. I knew it was in my neck. So that was scary. I figured it was over. And then I felt myself losing consciousness. I thought,
Bye, Diane, I wish I had met you sooner! Bye, world, I wish I were staying longer!
I think that must be what it’s going to be like when it really does happen. When you’re alive you want to live.

So, but they saved me. I got lucky. At first it seemed miraculous, but then the doctors told me it happens more often than you might think. Bullets are going so fast, they zip through and they’re out and gone. And this was a little one. I know, they’re saying I paid the guy to use a little one. Please give me a break. They tell me George Orwell got shot in the neck and lived. I always liked
Animal Farm
. The end of it, when you couldn’t tell the pigs from the men—that was powerful stuff. I always thought about what that ending said, not about the pigs and how they had changed, but about the men from the other farms. That would be us. People you couldn’t tell from pigs. Orwell still has a lot to say to us.

F
RANK SPENT SUNDAY AFTERNOON WITH NICK
and the FOG people, manning a blind north of Fort de Russey. It overlooked a deer trail, and sightings of deer predators as well as other big mammals were common: bear, wolf, coyote, lynx, aurochs, fox, tapir, armadillo, and then the one that had brought them there, reported a few days back, but as a questionable: jaguar?

Yes, there were still some sightings of the big cat. They were there at de Russey, in fact, to see if they too could spot it.

It didn’t happen that evening. There was much talk of how the jaguar might have survived the winters, whether it had inhabited one of the caves in the sandstone walls of the ravine, and eaten the deer in their winter laybys, or whether it had found a hole in an abandoned building and then gone dumpster diving like the rest of the city’s ferals. All kinds of excited speculation was bandied about (Frank stayed quiet when they discussed the feral life), but no sighting.

Nick was getting a ride home with his friend Max, and so Frank walked south, down the ravine toward the zoo. And there it was, crouching on the overlook, staring down at the now-empty salt lick. Frank froze as smoothly as he could.

It was black, but its short fur had a sheen of brown. Its body was long and sleek, its head squarish, and big in proportion to the body. Gulp. Frank slipped his hand in his pocket, grasped the hand axe and pulled it out, his fingers automatically turning it until it nestled in its best throwing position. Only then did he begin to back up, one slow step at a time. He was downwind. One of the cat’s ears twitched back and presented in his direction; he froze again. What he needed was some other animal to wander by and provide a distraction. Certainly the jaguar must have become extremely skittish in the time since the flood had freed it. Frank had assumed it had died and become just a story. But here it lay in the dusk of the evening. Frank’s blood had already rushed through him in a hot flood: big predator in the dusk, total adrenal awareness. You could see well in the dark if you had to. After his tiptoed retreat gained him a few more yards, Frank turned and ran like a deer, west toward the ridge trail.

He came out on Broad Branch and jogged out to Connecticut. Everything was pulsing a little bit. He made the call to Nancy and gave her the news of the sighting.

After that he walked up and down Connecticut for a while, exulting in the memory of the sighting, reliving it, fixing it. Eventually he found he was hungry. A Spanish restaurant on T Street had proven excellent in the past, and so Frank went to it and sat at one of its porch tables, next to the rail, looking at the passersby on the sidewalk. He was reading his laptop when suddenly Caroline’s ex sat down across from him. Edward Cooper, there in the flesh, big and glowering.

Frank, startled, recovered himself. He glared at the man. “What?” he said sharply.

The man stared back at him. “You know what,” he said. His voice was a rich baritone, like a radio DJ. “I want to talk to Caroline.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Frank said.

The blond man made a sour face. Aggrieved; tired of being patient. “Don’t,” he said. “I know who you are, and you know who I am.”

Frank saved, shut down, closed the lid of his laptop. This was strange; possibly dangerous; although the encounter with the jaguar put that in a different perspective, because it didn’t feel as dangerous as that. “Then why would I tell you anything about anybody at all?”

He could feel his pulse jumping in his neck and wrists. Probably he was red-faced. He put his laptop in his daypack on the floor by his chair, sat back. Without planning to, he reached in his jacket pocket and grasped the hand axe, turned it over in his hand until he had it in its proper heft. He met the man’s gaze.