Kim Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below

“Oh all kinds of places. I take it to a friend’s and we cut it up for firewood.”

“And that’s okay?”

“Oh sure. There’s an awful lot of trees need trimming. Lot of it being done by freelancers. The city need help, and the wood can be the pay.”

“It sounds like it works pretty well.”

“Well…” Cutter laughed.

“Hey, did you ever find out anything more about Chessman?”

“No, not really. I asked Byron but he didn’t know. He said he thought maybe he moved. There was a chess tournament up in New York he said Chessman talked about.”

“He said something about playing in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did Byron know his name?”

“He said he thought his name was Clifford.”

All the branches sprouted green buds. Tiny buds of a vivid light green, a color Frank had never seen before, a color that glowed on cloudy days, and sparked in his peripheral vision like fireflies. Green buds on a wet black bough, life coming back to the forest. It could not have been more beautiful. No moment in the Mediterranean climate could ever match this moment of impossible green.

He started going over to the park again, while at the same time he felt less anxious about living at the embassy house.

And yet he never returned to feeling quite himself. His face was still numb, inside his nose and right below it, and behind it. When he was shaving he saw that the numb part of his upper lip looked inert, and thus to himself he seemed deformed. He could not smile properly. He didn’t know how he felt about that. He supposed that the effect for others was slight, and that if noticed at all people did not talk about it, out of politeness.

The bros did not worry about that kind of thing. “Hey Jimmy! Jimmy Durante! How’s it hanging, did your dick survive its frostbite? That scared ya didn’t it! Did your nose heal straight? Can you breathe through it anymore?”

“No.”

“HA ha ha. Hey Mouthbreather! I knew you wouldn’t be able to the first time I saw it.”

“So who were those guys anyway?” Frank asked again.

“Who the fuck knows? We never saw them again.”

“Lucky for you.”

“No lie.”

“You guys could use a phone. Whip it out and 911 in situations like that.”

“Yeah right!”

“So that being the case, I brought you all application cards so you can get into FOG, the zoo group.”

“No way.”

“They tell me the park is going to he regulated this summer, so you’ll need to be a member to be able to stay in the park.”

“You think the cops will act any different just because we got some card on us?”

“Yes, I do. Plus, they give you a cell phone if you’re a member. It’s a little party line, but it works.”

“Oh good I always wanted one of those!”

“Shut up and fill out the form here. Come on—I bet you can put down any name you want. Besides, it can’t possibly break any parole agreements. They’re not going to throw you in jail for joining the Friends of the National Zoo for God’s sake.”

“Ha ha! Who you saying is on parole?”

“Yeah who you saying is on parole? At least we got noses”

“Ha ha. Just fill out the form.”

Coming up to their little closet, Frank heard someone in there talking to Rudra, and came up to the door curious to see who it was, as the old man seemed somewhat neglected in the house. But no one else was in there. Rudra started at the sight of Frank, stared up at him with an addled look, as if he had forgotten who Frank was.

“Sorry,” Frank said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I am happy you did.”

“Talking to yourself, were you?”

“Don’t think so.”

“I thought I heard somebody.”

“Interesting. Sometimes I, what say … I sing to myself. One kind of Tibetan singing makes two sounds from one voice. Head note? Overtone?” He opened his mouth and emitted a bass note lower than Frank would have expected from such a slight body; and at the same time there was a scratchy harmonic floating in the room.

“Very nice,” Frank said. “It reminds me of Louis Armstrong.”

Rudra nodded. “Very fine singer.” He opened his mouth again, sang deeply, “The odds, were a hundred to one against us,” like Louis played at two-thirds normal speed, slower and deeper.

“That’s right, very good! So you like him?”

“Very fine singer. Head tone undeveloped, but very strong.”

“Interesting.” Frank unrolled his groundpad, laid himself out with a small groan.

“Go to park?”

“Yes.”

“Find your friends?”

“Some of them.” Frank began to describe them and the situation out there—the bros, the fregans, his own project. He lay down on his back and left the laptop off, and talked about the paleolithic, and how the brain had evolved to feel good because of certain stimuli caused by behaviors performed repeatedly in the two-million-year run-up to humanity; and how they should be able to feel good now by living a life that conformed as closely to these early behaviors as possible. Which was what he had been trying to do, in his life out in the park.

“Good idea!” Rudra said. “Original mind. This is Buddhism also.”

“Yes? Well, I guess I’m not surprised. It seemed to me that you were talking about something like that when you spoke at NSF last year.”

Rudra didn’t appear to remember this talk, which had been such a shattering experience for Frank—a real paradigm buster, as Edgardo would say. Frank did not press the matter, feeling shy at admitting to the old man what a profound effect he had created, with what had apparently been an offhand comment. Instead he described to Rudra the ways in which he felt that prisoner’s dilemma and Snowdrift modeled ethics in a scientific way, how the games were scored and the strategies judged, and how, at the start of the winter, he had come to the tentative conclusion that it made best adaptive sense to pursue the strategy called always generous.

“Good idea,” Rudra said. “But what are these points? Why play for points?”

Frank was still pondering this when Sucandra and Padma clomped upstairs to see how the old man was doing. “Cookies,” Sucandra said, holding out a plate. “Fresh out of the oven.”

He and Padma sat on the floor in the doorway, and the four of them ate sugar cookies like kids at a sleepover.

“These are good,” Frank said. “I’ve been getting so hungry this winter.”

“Oh yes,” Sucandra said. “You get much hungrier in the cold.”

“And much colder when you’re hungry,” Padma added.

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “We learned that both ways, didn’t we?”

“Yes.”

Frank looked at them. “The Chinese?”

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “In their prison.”

“How long?”

“Ten years.”

Frank shook his head, trying to imagine this and failing. “How much did you get to eat?”

“A bowl of rice a day.”

“Did people starve?” Frank said, looking at the remaining cookies on the plate.

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “Died from hunger, died from cold.”

Padma nodded. “Others survived, but lost their wits.”

“Maybe we all did.”

“Yes, no doubt.”

“But I know who you mean when you say that. We had this old monk, you see, who was shitting some kind of tapeworm. Long red thing, segmented. Like millipede without legs. We knew this because he cleaned them up when it happened, and brought them to the group to offer them to the rest of us as food.”

“He claimed Bon spirit was inside him making food for us.”

Frank said, “So what did you do?”

“We chopped the worms up very fine and added them to the rice.”