Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

That was it exactly; to the brink of fear. It filled you up. The wind in your face. These Concord guys! That America’s first great thinkers had been raving nature mystics was not accident, but inevitable. The land had spoken through them. They had lived outdoors in the great stony forest of New England, with its Himalayan weather. The blue of the sky, the abyss of fear behind things. A day out on the river, skinny-dipping with Ellery Channing.

One evening as he hiked past Site 21 he saw that the old gang was back, looking as if they had never been away.

“Zeno, Fedpage, Andy, Cutter!”

“Hey there! Doctor Blood! Where you been?”

“How are you guys, where you been?”

“We haven’t been anywhere,” Zeno declared.

“What!” Frank cried. “You haven’t been here!”

Cutter waved a hand at two of his city park friends, sitting at the table with him. “Out and about, you know.”

Andy yelled, “What do you mean where you been? Where you been?”

“I’ve been staying with some friends,” Frank said.

“Yeah well—us too,” Zeno growled.

“Any sight of Chessman?”

“No.” And stupid of you to ask.

“Are you still doing stuff with FOG?”

“With FOG! Are you kidding?”

They told him about it all together, Zeno prevailing in the end: “—and Fedpage is still pissed off at them!”

“He sure has bad luck with that federal government.”

“You mean they have bad luck with him! He’s a Jonah!”

“I am not a Jonah! I’m just the only one who looks up my rights in the personnel policies and then sticks up for them.”

“You need to be more ignorant,” Zeno instructed.

“I do! I’ve got to stop reading all this shit, but I can’t.” Fedpage was reading the Post as he said this, so the others laughed at him.

Actually, it transpired, he was still doing some work with FOG, despite his beef with them, helping Nancy to organize chipping expeditions to tag more animals. To no one’s surprise, the bros had liked being given little dart guns, which shot chipped darts the size of BBs; and they liked their big hunts, when they went out in beater lines to shoot all the remaining unchipped animals they could find.

“The problem,” Zeno told Frank, “is that half these animals are already chipped, and we aren’t supposed to plunk them twice, but it’s so tempting once you’ve got one in your sights.”

“So you shoot anyway?”

“No, we start shooting each other!” Triumphant laughter at this. “It’s like those paintball wars. Andy must have ten chips in him by now.”

“That’s only ’cause he shot so many people first!”

“Now there are surveillance screens in this city where he is like twelve people in one spot.”

“He’s a jury!”

“So don’t you be trying to send us on no more secret spy missions,” Andy told Frank. “We’re all lit up like Christmas trees.”

“Protective coloration,” Frank suggested. “I should pass through you guys every night.”

“Don’t do that,” Zeno warned. “We take this opportunity to say no to Dr. No.”

“Yeah well, sorry about that guys, I meant to thank you and I know it was a long time ago now, but whenever I came out here you guys weren’t here, so I didn’t know.”

“We’ve been around,” Zeno said.

A silence stretched, and Frank sat on his old bench. “Why are you pissed off at FOG?” he asked Fedpage. “How exactly did you get bogarted by the evil Big Brother that is Friends of the National Zoo?”

“The Department of Parkland Security, you mean? Look, all I was saying was that we were doing regular national-park work on a volunteer basis, and that made us subject to federal liability, which means we have to sign their stipulated waivers or else the NPS would be left liable for any accidents, whereas with the waivers it would fall on Interior’s general personnel funds, which is where you would want it if you wanted any timely compensation! But what do I know?”

Zeno said, “So get on that, Blood. We want that fixed.”

“Okay. Well hey guys, I was just passing through on my way to meet the frisbees, I’m going to go join them. But it’s good to see you. I’ll drop on by again. I’m doing some sunset counts for FOG, and dawn patrols too, so I’ll be around. Are folks hanging here much now?”

No replies, as usual. The bros never much on discussing plans.

“Well, I’ll see you if I see you,” Frank said.

“ I’ll join you for a FOG walk,” Fedpage said darkly. “You need to hear the whole story about them.”

That day’s sunset was now gilding the autumn forest’s dull yellows and browns. Leaves covered the surrounding hillsides to ankle depth everywhere they could see. Cutter gestured at the view with the can of beer in his hand: “Ain’t it pretty? All these leaves, and nobody’s gonna have to leaf-blow them away.”

Fedpage did join him on a dawn patrol one morning, massaging his face to wake up. The two of them wandered slowly up the ravine, peering through the trees, pinging animals they saw with their FOG RFID readers. Fedpage talked under his breath most of the time. Perhaps obsessive-compulsive, with huge systems in his mind which made better sense to him than he could convey to other people. He was not unlike Anna in this intense regard for systems, but did not have Anna’s ability to assign them their proper importance, to prioritize and see a path through a pattern, which was what made Anna so good at NSF. Without that component, or even radically lacking in it, Fedpage was living on the street and crying in his beer, always going on about lost battles over semihallucinated bureaucratic trivia. An excess of reason itself a form of madness, indeed.

You needed it all working. Otherwise things got strange. Indecisiveness was a kind of vertigo in time, a loss of balance in one’s sense of movement into the future. When you weren’t actually in the state it was hard to remember how it had felt. “Forever wells up the impulse of choosing. ” So it might seem, when all was well.

He and Fedpage came on an old man, comatose in his layby—blue-skinned, clearly in distress. The two of them kneeled over him, trying to determine if he was still alive, calling Nancy and 911 both, then wondering whether they should try to carry him out to Broad Branch Road, or instead wait where they were and be the ping for the rescue team. Fedpage babbled angrily about poor response time averages while Frank sat there wishing he knew more about medical matters, resolving (yet again) to at least take a CPR course.

He said this to Fedpage and Fedpage snorted. “Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day .”

Bill Murray, trying to help a stricken homeless guy. Yet another truth from that movie so full of them; if you really wanted to help other people you would have to devote years of your life to learning how.

He tried to express this to Fedpage, just to pass the time congealing around them. Fedpage nodded as he listened to the stricken man’s stertorous breathing. “Maybe it’s just sleep apnea we got here. What a great fucking movie. Me and Zeno were arguing about how many years that day had to go on for Bill Murray. I said it couldn’t be less than ten years, because of the piano lessons and the med school and the, you know,” and he was off on a long list of all of the character’s accomplishments and how many hours it would take to learn these skills, and how much time he had had for them in any given version of the repeated day. “Also, when you think about it, if Bill Murray can do different things every day, and get a different response from the people around him, just how exactly is that different from any ordinary day? It ain’t any different, that’s what! Other people don’t remember what you did the day before, they don’t give a shit, they’ve got their own day to deal with! So in essence we’re all living our own Groundhog Day, right? Every day is always just the same fucking day.”