Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“Look,” Charlie said to the daycare director one time, “ I like the way he is.”

“Maybe you should be the one taking care of him, then,” she said. Which he thought was pretty bold, but she met his eye; she had her center to consider. And she had seen what she had seen.

“Maybe I should.”

On the Metro ride home, Charlie watched Joe as the boy stared out the window. “Joe, do you like daycare?”

“Sure, Da.”

“Do you like it as much as going to the park?”

“Let’s go to the park!”

“When we get home.”

THE THREE KAYAKERS WERE OUTat Great Falls again, testing the Fish Ladder. Charlie and Drepung were getting better at it; they could rush up three or four drops before they tired and turned and rode the drops back down. Frank was getting almost all the way to the top.

When they were done, and just riding the current downstream to their put-in, they discussed all that was happening, first the new stuff Phil Chase had introduced, and then the latest in the ongoing negotiations between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government. Drepung was excited about the possibilities opening up.

As they closed on shore, Frank said, “So, Drepung, do you, you know—believe in all the reincarnation stuff?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think you are the reincarnation of that last Panchen Lama, and all the ones before?”

Even as Frank was saying it, Charlie was seeing a bit of physical resemblance between the youth and photos he had seen of the previous Panchen Lama, despite how obese the previous one had gotten (although Drepung worked hard to hold down his weight). It was a look in the eye—somewhat like the look on Drepung’s face when Frank had given them climbing lessons. A wary, worried look—even a repressed fear—and sharp concentration. Of course it made sense. The Chinese government considered itself to be the master of the Panchen Lama.

“So are you part of these negotiations with the Chinese?” Charlie said.

“Yes.”

“But could you get, you know, remanded to them?”

“No, that won’t happen. The people and the Dalai Lama are behind me.”

“Shouldn’t you be announcing who you are, as a safeguard?”

“That’s one of the bargaining chips still out there, of course.”

“You wouldn’t want to be too late with that!”

“No.”

Charlie thought it over. “My Lord. What a world this is.”

“Yes.”

“So,” Frank persisted, “have you ever had any, like, memories of your previous incarnations?”

“No.”

Frank nodded. “That’s what the Dalai Lama said too, in the paper. He said he was an ordinary human being.”

“I am even more ordinary, as you know.”

“So why should you continue to believe you are the reincarnation of some previous person?”

“We are all such. You know—one’s parents.”

“Yes, but you’re talking about something else. Some wandering spirit, moving from body to body.”

“We all have those too.”

“But identifiable, from life to life?”

Drepung paused, then said, “I myself think that this is a heuristic device only.”

Charlie laughed. “A teaching device? A metaphor?”

“That’s what I think.”

Charlie began to think about that in the context of what had been happening to Joe.

“And what does it teach us?” Frank asked.

“Well, that you really do go through different incarnations, in effect. That in any life your body changes, and where you live changes—the people in your life, your work, your habits. All that changes, so much that in effect you pass through several incarnations in any one biological span. And what I think is, if you consider it that way, it helps you not to have too much attachment. You go from life to life. Each day is a new thing.”

“That’s good,” Frank said. “I like that. The theory of this particular Wednesday.”

Charlie was still thinking about Joe.

A few weeks later, by dint of some major begging, Charlie got Roy to give him ten minutes of Phil’s morning time. Dawn patrol, as it turned out, because it was not only the best time to fit something in, as Phil himself remarked, it was also the traditional time for him and Charlie to meet. On this occasion, however, a Sunday morning.

Charlie showed up at the White House having slept very little the night before. Phil met him in a car at the security gates, and they were driven down Constitution and past the front of the Lincoln Memorial. “Let’s walk from here,” Phil suggested. “I need the exercise.”

So they got out and were followed by Phil’s Secret Service team through the Korean War Memorial. It was a foggy morning, and still so early that the sun was not yet up. The pewter statues of the patrol hiked uphill through a wet mist, forever frozen in their awful moment of tension and dread. A long black wall on the Potomac side of the statues was filled with little white faces peering out from what seemed to be different depths within the stone, all bearing witness to the horrors of war. At the top of the memorial a small stone basin was backed by a retaining wall, on which was carved the message “FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.”

Phil stood for a while staring at it. Charlie left him to his thoughts and walked over to the apex of the statues. We here honor our sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they did not know and a people they never met.

Then Phil was beside him again. “It’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So many wars. So many people died.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if we can make it all worth it.”

“Sure we will,” Charlie said. “You’re leading the way.”

“Can anyone do that?”

“Sure. People like being part of a cause. And Americans like to like the president.”

“Or hate him.”

“Sure, but they’d prefer to like him. As with you. Your numbers are really high right now.”

“Any time you get shot your numbers go up.”

“I suppose that’s so. But there you are.”

Phil shook his head. “Doesn’t it seem like these memorials are getting better and better? This place is a heartbreaker.”

“They found a really good sculptor.”

“Let’s walk down and see FDR. He always cheers me up.”

“Me too.”

It took several minutes to walk from the Korean to the FDR Memorial, skirting the north bank of the Tidal Basin and heading for the knot of trees around it. On first arrival it looked unprepossessing; one felt that FDR had been shortchanged compared to the rest. It was a kind of walled park or gallery, open to the sky, with the walls made of rough-hewn red granite. Little pools and waterfalls were visible farther ahead, but it was all very unobtrusive, like a kids’ playground in some suburban Midwestern park.

But then they came to the first statue of the man—in bronze, almost lifesized, sitting on a strange little wheelchair, staring forward blindly through round bronze spectacles. He looked so human, Charlie thought, compared to the monumental gravity of the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. This, the statue said very obviously, had been another ordinary human being. Behind the statue on a smoothed strip of the granite were words from Eleanor Roosevelt that underscored this impression:

“Franklin’s illness gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons—infinite patience and never-ending persistence.”

“Yes,” Phil murmured as he scanned the words. “To think out the fundamentals of living. He was forty when the polio hit him, did you know that? He had had a full life as a normal person, I mean, unimpeded. He had to adapt.”