Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

After a while they got out the Apples to Apples game, and played a few rounds. Joe joined them in the game while continuing to draw with Anna on a big sheet of poster paper they had spread on the floor. He had recently taken to drawing in a big way, mostly sketching big stick figures of various creatures, often red creatures with a kind of Precambrian look, flying over stick forests of blue or green. Now he continued to add lines, and scribbled in patches, while insisting on being part of the game, so that they dealt him a hand, and Anna helped him to read what his cards said, whispering in his ear to his evident delight. The game—junior level, for Joe’s sake—dealt people hands of cards on which were printed various nouns, and then an adjective card was turned up by the player whose turn it was, and the rest provided nouns face down, and that player shuffled them and read them aloud, modified by the common adjective, and picked which combination he or she liked the best. The adjective now was SLIMY; the nouns read aloud by Nick were SLIMY ANTS, SLIMY MARSHMALLOWS, and SLIMY PIPPI LONGSTOCKING. You picked nouns tailored to that particular judge, or else just gave up and tried to be funny. It was a good game, and although Joe was somewhat out of his depth and would not admit it, his choice of nouns often had a Dada quality that seemed inspired, and he won about as frequently as any of them.

On this night he was into it. He got a hand he didn’t like for some reason, and threw the cards down and said “These are bad! I poop on these cards!”

“Joe.”

“I gotta win!”

“It doesn’t matter who wins,” Charlie said as always.

“Why do we keep the adjectives we win then?” Nick would always ask.

“We do that because they describe us so well when we read them aloud at the end,” Charlie would always respond. This was his addition to the game, as for instance, at the end of this one: “I’m noisy, soft, happy, strange, slimy, and old!” he read. “Pretty accurate, as usual.”

Nick said “I’m weird, wonderful, useful, skinny, slippery, and sloppy.”

Anna was good, hard, spooky, sharp, and important. Ever since she had won the cards for dirty and fat she had been unenthusiastic about Charlie’s addition to the game.

Joe was great, short, smooth, fancy, jolly, strong, creepy, and loud. He had won the most.

“What does it mean when an illiterate person wins a game that’s written down?” Charlie wondered.

“Be nice,” Anna said.

After that they sat and watched the fire. The rumble of other people’s generators sounded almost like traffic on Wisconsin. The chill air outside the front door smelled to Charlie of two-stroke engines, and fires in fireplaces. The smell of last winter. Sirens still wafted in from the city distance.

Inside they huddled by the fire. It had been well below freezing for the last week, probably the cause of the blackout, and it was going to be very cold upstairs, with the wind rattling the windows. And in the morning the fire would be out. After some discussion they decided to sleep in the living room again. The couches would do fine for Nick and Joe, and Anna and Charlie hauled the tigers’ mattress up the stairs from the cellar. All this was a ritual now; sometimes they did it without the excuse of a blackout.

Faces ruddy in the flickering firelight. It reminded Charlie of camping out, although they never got to have fires in the Sierra anymore. Anna read “Good-night Moon” to Joe yet one more time (on nights like this he demanded old favorites), while Nick and Charlie read books silently to themselves. This put all four of them out pretty quickly.

The next morning they saw that a little snow had fallen. They were just settling in for the day, Charlie planning to roast some green firewood over the flames of drier wood, when the power came back on with its characteristic click and hum. It had been eleven hours. On the news they found out that electricity for essential services had been provided to Baltimore by the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, and that this had helped the power company to get back online faster.

The day was already disarranged, so Charlie took Nick to school, then returned home, where he and Anna and Joe tried to settle in. None of them seemed to be enjoying this situation, Anna and Charlie trying to work in quick shifts while the other occupied Joe, who was curious to know why he wasn’t at daycare; and after a couple hours’ struggle, Charlie suggested he take Joe out for a walk while Anna continued to work.

It was a crisp, clear day. According to the little backpacking thermometer hanging from the bottom of the baby backpack (Anna’s idea, more data) the temperature outside was very near zero. It would have been perfect conditions for the baby backpack, because with Joe on his back they kept each other warm. But Joe refused to get in it. “I wanna walk,” he said. “I’m too big for that now, Dad.”

This was not literally true. “Well, but we could keep each other warm,” he said.

“No.”

“Okay then.”

It occurred to Charlie that it had been quite a while since Joe had been willing to get in the thing and take a ride. And it was looking a little small. Possibly Joe had gotten into it for the last time, and the final usage of it had passed without Charlie noticing. With a pang Charlie put it into the depths of the vestibule closet. How he had loved carrying Nick and then Joe around like that. He had done a lot of backpacking in his life, but no load on his back had ever felt so good to him as his boys. Instead of weighing him down they had lifted him up. Now that was over.

Oh well. They set out together on a walk through the hilly neighborhoods east of Wisconsin Avenue.

ON A BRIGHT CHILL SATURDAY MORNINGnot long after that, Charlie once again joined Drepung and Frank down on the Potomac, this time at a put-in just downstream from Great Falls, on the Maryland side.

Mornings on the river were filled with a blue glassy light unusual elsewhere in the city at that time of year. The deciduous trees were bare, the evergreens dusted with snow.

Frank generally paddled ahead of the other two, silent as he so often was, absorbed in the scene. Charlie and Drepung followed at a distance, talking over the events of the week and sharing their news.

“Did Frank tell you that he visited the original Shambhala?” Drepung asked Charlie.

“No, what do you mean?”

Drepung explained.

“It seems a funny place for Shambhala to have begun,” Charlie said. “Out there in the middle of nowhere.”

“Yes, doesn’t it? But in the eighth century it was different, and, well, howsoever it came about, that’s where it happened.”

“But eventually it ended up in Khembalung.”

“Yes. That is simply the Sherpa word for Shambhala. It came into use when the city was in a hidden valley east of Everest.”

“But then the Chinese came.”

“Yes. Then the inhabitants moved to the island.”

“Now under the Bay of Bengal.”

“Yes.”

“And so what becomes of Khembalung now?”

Drepung smiled and waggled his paddles. “Always here and now, right? Or at the farm in Maryland, in any case.”

“Okay, if you say so. And what about this original site, is it going to be drowned too, you said? Won’t that make three for three?”

“No, Frank said it will be close to the shore of the new lake, but they are going to build a dike that will keep it dry.”

“Another dike?”

Drepung laughed. “Yes, it does sound a bit too familiar, but I’ve looked at the maps and heard the plans, and it sounds as if the dike will be rather huge, and more than enough to serve the purpose.”