Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“What’s up Edgardo?” Kenzo finally said. “Cat got your tongue?”

“You people are idiots. You are always killing your best leaders. You might as well be some banana republic in Latin America! You’re just as bad as all the juntas you set up down there, I suppose it has to be that way. The good ones you kill and the bad ones you give all your money to. Call them good and kiss their ass.”

“Geez. Remember, this time the guy only wounded him. And it was a crazy guy.”

“It always is. They are easy to find here. Pick anyone.”

“Well, gee. Maybe we should change the subject. Have you thought of a new bestseller to write?”

For a long time Edgardo had entertained them on their runs with accounts of the nonfiction books he would write for the bestseller list, popularizing recent findings in the sciences. “Come on,” Kenzo encouraged him, “what was that last one? Why We Fuck Up ?”

“That would be too long to write,” Edgardo said. “That is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, at the least.”

The OMB guys floated back within earshot. “Edgardo, are you talking politics again?”

“Am I talking politics? What kind of a redundancy is that, when are any of us not talking politics? When you talk, you’re talking politics.”

“I didn’t know that. I don’t think of it that way.”

“It makes no difference what you think. It’s all politics. You people in this country don’t even know how good you’ve had it, to be able to just talk politics all this time rather than shoot it. So you do these kinds of things and don’t even notice how dangerous it is. Someday you will unleash the furies of la violencia down on your idiot heads, and only then will you know what you have lost.”

Phil started sending to Congress a new volley of legislation, all kinds of bills that pressured members of Congress to either vote for his programs or be revealed as obstacles, which would then initiate high-profile midterm election campaigns to remove them from office. It was not that the public would necessarily notice but that the party pols would and then they would direct the attack on obstacle representatives. So there was a lot of leverage there and the balance of the parties in the House of Representatives was close enough that Phil was already getting a lot of things through. If these got any momentum and results then by the time the midterm elections came it might be possible to build a solid majority and then accelerate even further. So: judicial appointments, executive actions, all were intensified and coordinated in a single larger campaign, coordinated by Roy and the brain trust. Fuel-mileage efficiency standards of seventy and eighty miles a gallon. A doubling of the gas tax. A return to progressive tax rates. An end to all corporate loopholes and offshoring of profits. Heavy financial support for the World Health Organization’s population stabilization efforts. AIDS and malaria eradication funds. Gun control legislation to give the NRA nightmares. It became clear that his team had taken over the tactic called, ironically enough, flooding, which had been used to such effect by the criminals who had hijacked the presidency at the start of the century. It was like a flurry in boxing, the hits just kept on coming, at a pace of three or four a week, so that in the scramble the opposition could not react adequately, not to any individual slaps nor to the general deluge. Right-wing pundits were wondering if Chase had arranged to get shot to gain this advantage, why had the gunman used a twenty-two, where was the evidence he had actually been shot anyway, could they stick a minicam down the hole? No? Wasn’t that suspicious?

But in the committees and on the floor of Congress the hammering went on. Roy said to Charlie, “The media is to legislation as professional wrestling is to Olympic wrestling. The real moves are hard to see. We’ve got them on the run, so come on what’s your latest?” The need for a constant stream of good initiatives was getting such that Roy was now hectoring the brain trust to think faster.

“This is just a start,” Phil would say at the end of his press conferences, waving away any questions that implied he had suddenly become more radical. “All this had to be done. No one denies that, except for special interests with some kind of horrid financial stake in things staying the same. We the people intend to overturn those destructive tendencies, so grab this tiger by the tail and hold on tight!”

A FEW SATURDAYS LATER,the three kayakers went out on the Potomac again, putting in just downstream from Great Falls.

The overflow channels on the Maryland side had been so torn by cavitation in the great flood that things had been forever changed there, and one new channel of the falls dropped down stepped layers in the gneiss in a very regular way. This channel had been diverted and a few adjustments made with concrete and dynamite to make it even more regular, leaving it stepped so that kayakers could with a hard push paddle up it, one level at a time, catching a rest on the flats before ascending the drops. “Some people make it all the way up to above the falls, and then ride the big drops back down again.”

“Some people,” Charlie said, looking over at Drepung and rolling his eyes. “Don’t you do that, Frank?”

“I don’t,” Frank said. “I can’t get to the top of the Fish Ladder. It’s hard. I’ve gotten around two-thirds of the way up it, so far.”

They rounded the bend leading into Mather Gorge, and the falls came in sight. The air was filled with an immediate low roar, and with clouds of mist. The surface of the river hissed with breaking bubbles.

The lowest rung of the Fish Ladder by itself turned out to be more than Charlie and Drepung wanted to attempt, but Frank shot at the bottom drop at full speed, hit the white flow and fought up to the first flat, then waved at them to give it a try. They did, but found themselves stalling and then sliding backwards down the white-water rapids, plunging in and struggling to stay upright.

Frank shot down the first drop and paddled over to them.

“You have to accelerate up the drop,” he explained.

“By just paddling faster?” asked Drepung.

“Yes, very fast and sharp. You have to dig hard.”

“Okay. And if it catches you and throws you back anyway, do you try to go backwards, or turn sideways on the way down?”

“I turn sideways, for sure.”

“Okay.”

Drepung and Charlie gave the lowest flume a few more tries, learning to turn as they stalled, which was in itself quite a trick; and near the end of an hour they both made it up to the first level patch of water, there to hoot loudly against the roar, turn, gulp, and take the fast slide back down to the foamy sheet of fizzing brown water. Yow! While they were doing this, Frank ascended six of the ten rungs of the chute, then turned and bounced down drop by drop, rejoining them red-faced and sweating.

After that they floated back downstream toward their put-in, looking over at the Virginia side to spot climbers on the dark walls of Mather Gorge. Frank got interested in a woman climbing solo on Juliet’s Balcony, and led them over to watch her climb for a while. Charlie and Drepung reminisced about their one climbing lesson on these walls as if it had been an expedition to Denali or Everest.

While paddling lazily back across the river, Frank said, “Hey, Drepung, I’ve got a question I’ve been meaning to ask you—that day at the MCI Center, what was that with you putting a scarf around the Dalai Lama’s neck, before he gave his talk?”

“Yeah, what was that about?” Charlie chimed in.

Drepung paddled on for a while.

“Well, you know,” he said at last, looking away from the other two, so that he was squinting into the sunlight squiggling over the river. “Everyone needs someone to bless them, even the Dalai Lama. And Khembalung is a very important place in Tibetan Buddhism.”