Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

Anna had been pleased when Diane asked her to join the Presidential Science Advisor’s staff, but it only took her a short period of reflection to decide against accepting the offer.

She knew she was right to do so, but explaining why to Diane and Frank had been a little tricky. She couldn’t just come out and say “I prefer doing things to advising people to do things,” or “I like science more than politics.” It wouldn’t have been polite, and besides, she wasn’t sure that was the real reason anyway. So all she could do was claim an abiding interest in her work at NSF, which was true. It was always best when your lies were true.

“But you’re the one who has been finding all these programs that knit together the federal agencies,” Frank said. “You’d be perfect to help in a project like this. You could maybe come over on loan for a year or so.”

This confirmed Anna’s suspicion that it was Frank’s idea to invite her over to the White House. Very nice of him, she liked that very much—but she said, “I can keep doing that from here, and still run my division too.”

“Maybe.”

Frank frowned, almost said something, stopped. Anna could not guess what it might have been. Some personal appeal? He looked a bit flushed. But maybe he was abashed at the thought of how little time he now had to give to his work on biological algorithms, his actual field. With this move he had shifted almost entirely to policy—to administration. To politics, in a word.

Of course maybe their circumstances called for a shift from science to policy, as an emergency measure, so to speak. Also an application of science to policy, which she knew was what Frank had in mind. Anna knew it was very common among scientists to be science snobs, and hold that no work in the world was as good and worthy as scientific research. Anna did not want to fall prey to that error even though she felt it pretty strongly herself, or at least, felt that she was better at science than at any of the mushier stuff. Correcting for that bias adequately was one part of the confusion of her feelings about all this. She would make lists sometimes of arguments pro and con, of qualities and their relative values, attempting to quantify and thus clarify her feelings.

In any case she held to her refusal, and to her job at NSF. And as she sat in the Metro on the way home, she thought somewhat grimly that it was too bad that Charlie hadn’t stuck to his guns too, and refused his new job offer like she had. Because here she was going home early again, to pick up Nick from school and take him to his piano lessons.

Of course Charlie’s situation had been different: he had been faced with a case of “come back or lose your job.” Still—if he had held—how much easier life would have been for her. Not that she ever shirked any work at all, but it would have been easier for the boys too. Not so much Nick, but Joe. She was intensely worried about Joe going into the White House daycare center. Was he ready for that? Would it make him even stranger—stranger and more difficult, to put it plainly—than he already was? Or would it normalize him? Was he perhaps autistic? Or just fractious? And why was he fractious? And what would be the effect on him (and on the other children) of confining him in a single room or group or situation for an entire day? Even Charlie, with all his energy and flexibility, had not been able to keep up with Joe’s demand for the new. She was afraid that in daycare, he and everyone around him would go mad.

Not that she put it exactly that way to herself. In her conscious mind she focused on incremental changes, specific worries, without moving on to larger and vaguer concepts. The conscious mind wasn’t the whole story, as she knew from her troubled sleep, but that was what she could actually think about and work on directing, and so she did.

This was one of many differences between her and Charlie, most of which were accentuated when they both worked at home. This was a bad system for other reasons, because it meant Joe was around too, scheming for attention when she was attempting to work or think, but sometimes it just had to be done, as when the Metro was down for the supposedly last round of flood repairs. And there she would be, at the computer, staring at the spreadsheet on the screen, entering data on pesticides in stream water as part of a project to measure their effects on amphibians, endless lists of chemical and product names collated from a wide range of studies, so that quantities had to be normed and reformatted and analyzed, meaning a whole flurry of highly specific technical e-mails from colleagues to be dealt with—questions, comments, criticisms concerning details of math or chemistry or statistical methodology, working in the parts per billion range—

And at the same time Charlie would be audible from the floor below, trying to amuse Joe while holding a simultaneous headphone conversation with his friend Roy, shouting out things like, “Roy these are not IDIOTS you’re dealing with here, you can’t just LIE to them! WHAT? Okay well maybe you can lie to THEM, but make it a smart lie. Put it at the level of myth, these are like Punch and Judy figures, and your people want to be doing the punching! Sledgehammer them in the forehead with this stuff! JOE! STOP THAT!”

And so on. Sledgehammer them in the forehead? Really, Anna couldn’t bear to listen.

But now this was Charlie’s work, full-time and more—meaning, as in the old days, evenings too. Of course Anna spent a lot of evenings working, but for Charlie it was something he had not done since Joe had arrived. Endless phone conversations now, how much help could these be? Of course there was the new administration’s first sixty days to execute successfully, accounting for much of this rush, but Anna doubted that very much would come of that. How could it? The system was simply slower than that. You could only do things at the speed they could be done.

So, whereas before she had most often come home to find the house in an uproar, Charlie cooking operatically while Joe banged pots and Nick read under the lamp in his corner of the couch, with the dinner soon to be on the table, now she often got home to find Nick sitting there like an owl, reading in the dark, and no one else home at all—and her heart would go out to him, all alone at seven p.m., at age twelve—

“You’ll go blind,” she would say.

“Mom,” he would object happily.

—and she would kiss his head and turn on his light and barge around banging her toes as she turned on the other lights and went out to the kitchen to rustle something up before she starved—and sometimes there would be nothing in the fridge or the cupboards that she could cook or eat, and grumpily she would throw on her daypack and tell Nick to answer the phone, if she did not need him to come along and carry extra bags, and would walk down the street to the Giant grocery store, still grumpy at first but then enjoying the walk—

And then at the grocery store there would be no meat on the shelves, and few fresh veggies, fewer fruits. She would have to forget about her list and troll the aisles for something palatable, amazed once again at the sight of so many empty shelves—she had thought like everyone else that it would be a temporary thing—then getting angry at people for their selfish hoarding instincts. Before this winter—ever since the flood, really—people had hoarded some of the essentials, but now it had spread far beyond toilet paper and bottled water, to almost every shelf in the store. But particularly to all the foods she most liked to eat. It had gotten so bad that once, when in her hurry she had driven the car, she got back in and drove over to the smaller grocery store on Woodson, and they didn’t have any eggplant either, though she craved it. So she got zucchini instead, and back home, late, starving, made chicken soup.