Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“No, I don’t think so.”

“That’s good. I know some of those guys from my time at DARPA. I liked them. Some of them, anyway.”

“I know. I’m sure the ones you liked are all innocent of this.”

“Right.” Edgardo laughed. “Well, fuck them. What should I tell Frank?”

“Tell him to hang in there.”

“Do you think it would be okay to tip him that his girlfriend is still involved in a root canal?”

“I don’t know.” Umberto sucked on his cigarette, blew out a long plume of white smoke. “Not if you think he’ll do anything different.”

ALL FRANK COULD THINK ABOUT NOWwas how he could get in touch with Caroline. Apparently showing up in her surveillance of her ex had not worked; there was no way of telling why. Surely she had motion checkers to flag intrusions or appearances or changes that she needed to check. That was the way surveillance cameras worked; you couldn’t just film real time and watch it later, there was never the time for that. And so…

Something must be wrong.

He could go to Mount Desert Island. He thought there was a good chance that Edgardo was right about her staying up there. It was a big island, and she had obviously loved it; her idea of what hiding out meant was tied to that place. And if she kept a distance from her friend’s camp, kept to herself somewhere else on the island, her ex would assume she had bolted elsewhere (unless he didn’t) and she would be able to lie low.

But in that case, how would Frank find her?

What would she have to have? What would she not stop doing? Shopping for food? Getting espressos? Bicycling?

He wasn’t really sure; he didn’t know her well enough to say. She had said there was great mountain biking to be had on the gravel carriage roads that wound around the granite knobs on the eastern half of the island, on which you could bike with no one seeing you, except for other bikers. Did that mean he should go up and rent a mountain bike and ride around on this network, or hang out at the backwoods intersections of these gravel roads, and wait for her to pass by accident? No. It took a long time to drive up there and back. If you couldn’t fly you had to drive. But there was so much else going on down in D.C., and even elsewhere around the world; he needed to go to San Diego again, he needed to visit London, it would be good to see that site in Siberia, even get to Antarctica and visit Wade if he could.

On the other hand, his tree had been cut down, his battery cables cut, his kayak wrecked, his computer destroyed. He had to deal with it somehow. It was in his face and in his thoughts. He had to do something.

But instead of doing something, he sat in the garden at the farm, and weeded. He woke up at dawn to find Rudra at the window, looking out at the river. Quicksilver slick under gray mist streamers. Trees on the far bank looking like ghosts.

He helped Rudra with his morning English lessons. Rudra was working from a primer prepared under the tutelage of the Dalai Lama, and used to teach the Tibetan-speaking children their English:

“ ‘There are good anchors to reality and bad anchors to reality. Try to avoid the bad ones.’ Ha!” Rudra snorted. “Thanks for such wisdom, oh High Holiness! Look, he even calls them the Four Bad D’s. It’s like the Chinese, they are always Four Thises and Six Thats.”

“The Eight Noble Truths?” Frank said.

“Bah. That’s Chinese Buddhism.”

“Interesting. And what exactly are the Four Bad D’s?”

“Debt, depression, disease, death.”

“Whoah. Those are four bad D’s, all right. Are there four good D’s?”

“Children, health, work, love.”

“Man you are a sociobiologist. Could you add habits, maybe?”

“No. Number very important. Only room for four.”

Frank laughed. “But it’s such a good anchor. It’s what allows you to love your life. You love your habits the way you love your home. As a kind of gravity that includes other emotions. Even hate.”

Rudra shrugged. “I am an exile.”

“Me too.”

Rudra looked at him. “You can move back to your home?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are not an exile. You are just not at home.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“Why would you not move home if you could?”

“Work?” Frank said.

But it was a good question.

That night, as they were falling asleep in the ever-so-slightly-rocking dark of their suspended room, the wind rustling the leaves of the grove, Frank came back to the morning’s conversation.

“I’ve been thinking about good correlations. We need a numbered list of those. My good correlation is the one between living as close to a prehistoric life as you can, and being happy, and becoming more healthy, and reducing your consumption and therefore your impact on the planet. That’s a very good correlation. Then Phil Chase had another one at his inaugural. He talked about how social justice and women’s rights correlate with a steady-state replacement rate for the population, which would mean the end of rapid population growth, and thus reduce our load on the planet. That’s another very good correlation. So, I’m thinking of calling them the Two Good Correlations.”

“Two is not enough.”

“What?”

“Two is not a big enough number for this kind of thing. There is never the Two This or the Two That. You need at least three, maybe more.”

“But I only know two.”

“You must think of some more.”

“Okay, sure.” Frank was falling asleep. “You have to help me though. The question will be, what’s the third good correlation?”

“That’s easy.”

“What?”

“You think about it.”

For some reason no one was hanging out at Site 21 these days. Maybe the heat and the mosquitoes. Back at the farm Frank yanked weeds out of the garden rows. He cut the grass of the lawn with a hand scythe, swinging it like a golf club, viciously driving shot after shot out to some distant green. At night in the dining room he ate at the end of a table, reading, bathed in a sea of Tibetan voices. Sometimes he would talk to Padma or Sucandra, then go to bed and read his laptop for a while. He missed the bros and their rowdy assholery. It occurred to him one night in the dining hall that not only was bad company better than no company, there were times when bad company was better than good company. But it was a different life now.

At work, Frank was passing along some great projects for Diane to propose to the president. The converter that could be put in all new cars so that they could run on eighty-five percent ethanol could in a different form be added to already existing cars, like smog-control devices had been. Legislating that as a requirement would immediately change their fuel needs, and overwhelm their limited ability to make ethanol, but Brazil had shown it could be ramped up pretty fast. And there were advances on that front coming out of RRCCES, another offshoot of Eleanor’s work, carried forward by other colleagues of hers, in which an engineered enzyme allowed them to get away from corn and start to use wood chips for their ethanol feed stock, and might soon allow them to use grass; that biotech accomplishment was another kind of holy grail.

Burning ethanol still released carbon to the atmosphere, of course, but the difference was that this was carbon that had only recently been drawn down from the atmosphere by plant growth, and when they grew more feedstock, carbon would be drawn down again, so that it was almost a closed loop, with human transport as part of the cycle. As opposed to releasing the fossil carbon that had been so nicely sequestered under the ground in the form of oil and coal.