Sixty Days and Counting (53 page)

Preemptive dividending? Usufruct? I leave it as an exercise to the responders to find the right words for this.

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I say it’s simple, at least at the level of fundamentals. Everyone’s part of the team and should have a part to play. Capital is created by everyone, and should be owned by everyone. People are owed the worth of what they do, and whatever they do adds to humanity somehow, and helps make our own lives possible, and is worth a living wage and more. And the Earth is owed our permanent care. And we have the capability to care for the Earth and create for every one of us a sufficiency of food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care, education, and human rights.

To the extent our economic system withholds or flatly opposes these values and goals, it is diseased. It has to be changed so that we can do these things that are well within our technological capabilities. We have imagined them, and they are possible. We can make them real.

Of course they can happen. You thought they couldn’t happen, but why? Because we aren’t good enough to do it? That was part of the delusion. Underneath the delusion, we were always doing it.

That’s what we’re doing in history; call it the invention of permaculture. By permaculture I mean a culture that can be sustained permanently. Not unchanging, that’s impossible, we have to stay dynamic, because conditions will change, and we will have to adapt to those new conditions, and continue to try to make things even better—so that I like to think the word permaculture implies also permutation. We will make adaptations, so change is inevitable.

Eventually I think what will happen is that we will build a culture in which no one is without a job, or shelter, or health care, or education, or the rights to their own life. Taking care of the Earth and its miraculous biological splendor will then become the long-term work of our species. We’ll share the world with all the other creatures. It will be an ongoing project that will never end. People worry about living life without purpose or meaning, and rightfully so, but really there is no need for concern: inventing a sustainable culture is the meaning, right there always before us. We haven’t even come close to doing it yet, so it will take a long time, indeed it will never come to an end while people still exist.

All this is inherent in what we have started, which is why I hope the American electorate delivers big progressive majorities in the congressional elections. We have to become the stewards of the Earth. And we have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.

“This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.” Our time has to be understood as a narrow gate, a window of opportunity, a crux point in history. It’s the moment when we took responsibility for life on Earth. That’s what I say. And I’ll have more to say about it later.

F
RANK AND CAROLINE FLEW TOGETHER
out to San Diego.

There was an awkwardness between them now that Frank didn’t understand. It was as if, now that they were free to do what they wanted, they didn’t know what it was. It reminded Frank in a rather frightening way of his old inability to decide—of how that had felt. They had no habits. They sat side by side, and long silences grew.

Before they had left, Frank had dropped by the office. He had walked into Edgardo’s office and given the Argentinian a big hug, his cheek crushed against the tall man’s skinny chest. “Thanks Edgardo.”

Edgardo had smiled his wry smile. “You are welcome, my friend. It was my pleasure, believe me.”

They had then discussed the situation as conveyed by Umberto; it sounded like things would be okay. Phil was untangling the intelligence community, though that would take some doing. Frank then explained his plan, and Edgardo had raised a finger. She might not want to talk about this last year, he had warned. She may never want to. A lot of us are like that. I don’t know if she is, but if so, be ready for it. It may always be a case of limited discussion.

Frank had nodded, thinking it over.

Besides, Edgardo had continued—even if she did fix the election single-handedly, and frame her ex to make it look like he framed her, what’s anyone to do about that now?

Frank’s uneasy shrug had sparked Edgardo’s most delighted and cynical laugh. It echoed in his mind all the way across the country.

In San Diego, Frank drove their rental car up to La Jolla. First to the top of Mount Soledad, to show her the area from on high; then down to UCSD, where he found parking and walked her through the eucalyptus groves in their ranks and files and diagonals. Then up the great promenade between the big pretty buildings, the ocean often visible out to the west. Up the curving path on the east side of the library, an inlaid piece of sculpture made to resemble a snake’s back. An inscription from Milton carved into the snake’s head made it clear just which snake it was. Central Library as the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: very apt.

Caroline smiled when she saw it, and kissed Frank on the cheek. “Want an apple?” That was the best sign he had gotten from her all day, and his spirits expanded a bit.

Then out across the street, onto the bluff overlooking the Pacific. He pointed out his bedroom nook, and watched her look out at the view. You could see San Clemente Island on the horizon, seventy miles out to sea. He could see that she liked it. Then they returned to the streets, and up Torrey Pines to the new institute.

Into Leo’s lab. Leo regarded Caroline with interest as Frank introduced them.

“Leo, this is my friend—”

“Carrie Barr,” Caroline said, and put out her hand.

“Hi,” Leo said, taking it. “Leo Mulhouse. Good to meet you.”

After a bit of chat about their trip out:

“Are the insertions still going well?” Frank asked.

“They’re good,” Leo said. “Results are really good right now.”

Frank explained to Caroline some of what they were doing, and tried to answer her questions with the right amount of technical detail, never an easy thing to judge. She looked different to Frank now, as if she had instantly become a Californian now that she was here. Maybe it was that he had seldom seen her in the sun. It was hard to believe how little time they had actually spent together. He didn’t know how much biology she knew, or whether she was interested in it.

After that, Frank had a meeting on campus. “Do you want to join me for it, or do you want to have a look around while I talk to him?”

“I’ll have a look around.”

“Okay. Let’s meet back at Leo’s lab in an hour, okay?”

“Fine.” Off she went.

Frank walked over to the coffee kiosk in the eucalyptus grove at the center of campus, where he had arranged to meet with Henry Bannet of Biocal. They shook hands, and in short order were looking at Frank’s laptop and the PowerPoint show that Frank had cobbled together for him. As Frank spoke, he added stuff Leo had just told him a few minutes before. Bannet proved to be much as Leo had said: pleasant, professionally friendly, all in the usual way—but he had a quickness of eye that seemed to indicate some kind of impatience. Once or twice he interrupted Frank’s explanations with questions about Yann and Eleanor’s methods. He knew a lot. This guy, Frank thought, wanted gene therapy to work.

“Have you talked to your tech transfer office about this?” Bannet asked.

“It’s Eleanor Dufours who is the P.I.,” Frank said. “She’ll be the one leading the way with any start-up.”

“Okay,” Bannet said, looking a bit surprised. “We can discuss that later.”

By the time Frank got back to Leo’s lab, Caroline was already there, and so were Marta and Eleanor, with Marta looking most intrigued.

“Frank!” Marta said. “I didn’t know you were going to be out here again so soon.”

“Yes, I am. Hi, Eleanor. Have you guys met my friend—”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “Leo introduced us,” and for a second everyone was saying something at once.

After a brief laugh, they fell silent. “Well!” Marta said. She had a gleam in her eye that Frank had seen before. “What a lucky coincidence! We were just going to grab Leo for dinner in Del Mar, to celebrate the latest results—did he tell you about those? Why don’t you two join us?”

Frank said, “Oh, well—”

“Sure,” Caroline said, “that sounds great.”

So there they were at one of the beach restaurants in Del Mar, talking away cheerfully. Given the results in the lab, they had a lot to be cheerful about. Caroline was seated on one side of Frank, Marta on the other. It made him uneasy, but there was nothing he could do. And besides he too had cheerful news, in the form of his meeting with Henry Bannet.

“So does that mean you’re moving back?” Marta said to Frank when the others were all talking among themselves.

“Yes, I think so.”

“You’ve been out there a long time—what has it been, three years?”

“Almost,” Frank said. “It feels like more.”

After dinner, Marta invited them to come along with them to the Belly-Up, and again Caroline agreed before Frank could beg off. So there they were, in the crush of dancers on the floor of the Belly-Up, Frank dancing with three women, watching Marta and Caroline shouting over the music into each other’s ears and then laughing heartily, before excusing themselves and going off to the ladies’ room together. Frank watched this appalled. He had never even imagined Marta and Caroline meeting, much less becoming friendly. Now he was surprised to see that they looked somewhat alike, or were in some other way similar. And really, now that he thought of it, it was gratifying that Marta liked Caroline—a kind of approval of his judgment, or his D.C. life. Part of a more general amnesty. But it also felt like trouble, in some obscure way Frank could not pin down. At the very least it probably meant he was going to get laughed at a lot. Well, whatever. Nothing to be done about that. There were worse fates.

Frank had made reservations for the night at a motel in Encinitas, but for some reason he was nervous about that; and besides, he wanted to take Caroline up to Leucadia. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep until he did.

So he explained as they left the Belly-Up, and she nodded, and he drove north on the coast highway.

“So?” Frank said. “How are you liking it?”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “And I like your friends. But, you know—I’m not sure what I would do out here.”

“Well—anything you want, right? I mean, you’re going to have to do something different anyway. You aren’t going to be going back into intelligence….”

But maybe she thought she was. Maybe that was it.

She didn’t say anything, so he dropped the matter, feeling more uncertain than ever.

He turned left off the coast highway in Leucadia, onto the street that led to Neptune.

He parked a little down from Leo’s house. As they walked up the street, gaps to their left again revealed the enormous expanse of the Pacific, vast and gray under the marine layer, which was patterned by moonlight. Like something out of a dream. He had her here at last. Breaking waves cracked and grumbled underfoot, and the usual faint haze of mist salted the air.

He stopped in the street in front of one of the cliffside houses. The cliff here had given way in the big storms, and even the streetside wall of this particular house was cracked. It appeared that one corner of its outer foundation overhung the new face of the cliff. There was a
FOR SALE BY OWNER
sign stuck in the Bermuda grass of a narrow front lawn.

Frank said, “I followed up on something Leo said, and checked the USGS study of this part of the coast, and he’s right—this is a little buttress here, a little bit of a point, see? We’re a touch higher, and the iceplant doesn’t grow as well on the cliff, and there was this erosion, but the point itself is strong. I think this will be the last erosion you see here for a while. And there are things you can do to shore things up. And, you know, if worse came to worst, we could tear down this house entirely and build nearer the street. Something small and neat.”

“Like in this tree?” Caroline said, gesturing at the big eucalyptus tilting over them.

Frank grinned. “Well, incorporating it maybe. We’d have to save it somehow.”

She smiled briefly, nodded. “My treehouse man.”

She walked out to the edge of the cliff, looked down curiously. Anywhere else on Earth this would be a major sea cliff; here it was a little lower than average for North County, at about seventy feet. Everywhere sea cliffs were eroding at one rate or another.

“There’s a staircase down to the beach, just past Leo and Roxanne’s,” Frank told her, pointing to the south. “There’s a bike lane on the coast highway that runs from here all the way down to UCSD. I think it’s about twelve miles. You could get a job down there on campus, or nearby, and we could bike down there to work. Take the coast cruiser when we need to. We could make it work.”

“Well good,” Caroline said, staring at him in the moonlight. “Because I’m pregnant.”

F
RANK DREAMED THAT CHARLIE CAME
to him at the end of a day’s work and said, “Phil wants to see Rock Creek,” and off they went in a parade of black Priuses. In the park it was as snowy as in the depths of the long winter, and they crunched on snowshoes through air like dry ice. At Site 21 the bros had a bonfire going, and Frank introduced the bundled-up Phil as an old friend and the bros did not notice him, they were focused on the bonfire and their talk—all except Fedpage, who looked up from the
Post
he was feeding to the fire. He studied Phil for a second and his eyebrows shot up. “Whoah!” he said, and knocked his glasses up his nose to have a better look. “What’s this, some kind of Prince Hal thing going on here?” He jerked his head to the side to redirect Zeno’s attention to the visitor. “Oh, hey,” Zeno said as he saw who it was. Frank was afraid he would go all blustery and false like he often did with Frank himself, but Phil slipped through all that and soon they were adding fuel to the fire, and talking about Vietnam, and Zeno was fine. Frank felt a glow of pleasure at that. But otherwise it was cold, unless you sat too close to the fire, and the hour grew late, and yet on the Viet vets reminisced; Frank shared a glance with the Secret Service man sitting beside him, a black man he had never seen (and on waking he would remember this man’s face so clearly, it was utterly distinct, a face he had never seen before—where did the faces like that come from, who were they?) and their shared glance told them that they both had realized that the president liked this kind of scene, that he was a bullshitter at heart, like Clinton, like—how far did it go back? Washington? And so they were going to be there all night, talking about Vietnam.