Kim Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below

“We seem to be getting very rich.”

The Khembalis’ vegetable garden lay outside their door in the backyard. It was obsessively tended, even in winter, and now that spring was here the black soil mounding up in long rows from the pale mulch was dotted everywhere by new greens. Immaculately espaliered branches of dwarf fruit trees were dotted with lime-green points and no longer looked dead. If there was any sun at all during the day the garden would be filled with elderly Khembalis sitting on the ground, weeding and gossiping. Frank joined Rudra and this group for a couple of hours on Sunday mornings, puttering about in the usual gardening way. Rudra spoke to the others in quick Tibetan, not trying to keep Frank in the conversation. Frank had his Tibetan primer, and was still trying to learn, but the language’s origins were not Indo-European, and it seemed to Frank a very alien system, hard to pronounce, and employing endings that sounded alike in the same way the letters of the alphabet looked alike. To compound his difficulties, Khembali was an eastern dialect of Tibetan, with some important differences in pronunciation that had never been written down. It made for slow going. Mostly they reverted to English.

The lengthening days got fuller, impossible though that seemed. In the mornings Frank went to Optimodal, then to work; ran with the lunch runners when he could get away, then back to work; in the evenings over to the park for a frisbee run, passing the bros and catching a brief burst of their rambunctious ass-holery; then to a restaurant, often an impulse stop; and back to the house, to help where he could, usually the final cleanup in the kitchen. By the time he went out to the shed and Rudra, he was almost asleep.

Rudra was usually sitting up in bed, back against the headboard. Sometimes he seemed to be daydreaming, others observant, even if only looking at the candle. He seemed attentive to the quality of Frank’s silences. Sometimes he watched Frank without actually listening to him. Frank found that unnerving—although sometimes, when he quit talking and sat on his bed, reading or tapping away at his laptop, he became aware of a feeling that seemed in the room rather than in himself, of peacefulness and calm. It emanated from the old man. Rudra would watch him, or space out, perhaps humming to himself, perhaps emit a few bass notes with their head tones buzzing in a harmonic fifth. Meditation, Rudra said once when asked about them. What might meditation be said to be doing? Could one disengage awareness, or rather the active train of consciousness, always spinning out its string of sentences? Leaving only awareness? Without falling asleep? And what then was the mind doing? Was the deep thinking in the unconscious actually continuing to cogitate in its own hidden way, or did it too calm? Memories, dreams, reflections? Was there someone in there below the radar, walking the halls of the parcellated mind and choosing which room to enter, going in and considering the contents of that parcellation, and its relation to all the rest?

God he hoped so. It was either that or else he was zoning through his days in a haze of indecision. It could be that too.

He was almost asleep one night when his cell phone beeped, and he roused to answer it, knowing it was her.

“Frank it’s me.”

“Hi.” His heart was pounding. The sound of her voice had the effect of cardiac paddles slapped to his chest. The sensation was actually kind of frightening.

“Can you meet?”

“Yeah sure.”

“I know you’re in Arlington now. How about the Lincoln Memorial, in an hour?”

“Sure.”

“Not on the front steps. Around the back, between it and the river.”

“Isn’t that still fenced off?”

“South of that, then. South of the bridge then, on the new levee path.”

“Okay.”

“Okay see you.”

Rudra turned out to have been sitting up in the gloom. Now he was looking at Frank as if he’d understood every word, as why not; it had not been a complicated conversation.

Frank said, “I’m going out.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be back later.”

“Back later.” Then, as Frank was leaving: “Good luck!”

The banks of the Potomac between the Watergate and the Tidal Basin had been rebuilt with a broad levee just in from the river, topped by a path running under a double row of cherry trees. The Corps of Engineers had displayed their usual bravura style, and the new cherry trees were enormous. Under them at night Frank felt dwarfed, and the entire scene took on a kind of pharaonic monumentalism, as if he had been transported to some vast religious site on the banks of the Nile.

He stopped to look over the water to Theodore Roosevelt Island, where during the great flood he had seen Caroline in a boat, motoring upstream. That vision stood like a watermark in his mind, overlaying all his memories of the inundated city. He had never remembered to ask her what she had been doing that afternoon. She had stood alone at the wheel, looking straight ahead. Sometimes life became so dreamlike, things felt heraldic or archetypal, etched since the beginning of time so that one could only perform actions that already existed. Ah God, these meetings with Caroline made him feel so strange, so alive and somehow more-than-alive. He would have to ask Rudra about the nature of that feeling, if he could find some way to convey it. See if there was a Buddhist mental realm it corresponded to.

There in the trees below stood the Korean War Memorial. Caroline emerged from these trees, saw him on the levee and waved. She hurried up the next set of broad shallow steps, and there under the cherry trees they embraced. She hugged him hard. Her body felt tense, and out here in the open he felt apprehensive himself. “Let’s go back to my van,” he suggested. “It’s too open here.”

“No,” she said, “your van chip is on active record now.”

“So they know I’m here?”

“It’s being recorded, is a better way to put it. There’s comprehensive coverage in D.C. now. So they know where you drive. But they don’t know I’m here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. As sure as I can be.” She shivered.

He held her by the arm. “You’re not chipped?”

“No. I don’t think so. Neither of us are.”

She took a wand from her pocket, checked them both. No clicks. They walked under the cherry trees, dark overhead against the city’s night cloud. There were a few solitaries out, mostly runners, then another couple, possibly trysting like Frank and Caroline.

“How can you stand it?” Frank said.

“How does anybody stand it? We’re all chipped.”

“But most people no one wants to trace.”

“I don’t know. The banks want to know. That means most people.” She shrugged; it happened to everyone, that’s just the way things were now. Best not to want privacy.

But now, under the cherry trees, they were alone. No cars, no chips, phones left in their cars. They were off the net. No one else in the world knew where they were at that moment. It was somewhat like being in their little bubble universe of passion. A walking version of that union. Frank felt her upper arm press against his, felt the flushing in all his skin, the quickened pulse. It must be love, he thought. Even with Marta it had never been like this. Or was it perhaps just the element of danger that seemed to envelop her? Or the mysterious nature of that danger?

They sat on one of the benches overlooking the Tidal Basin. For a while they kissed. The feeling that poured through Frank then had less to do with their caresses, ravishing as they were, than with the sense of sharing a feeling; the opening up to one another, the vulnerability of giving and receiving. Very possibly, Frank thought in one of their hard silent hugs, their histories had caused them both to want this feeling of commitment more than anything else. After all the bad that had happened, a way to be with someone, to let down one’s guard, to inhabit a shared space… Them against the world. Or outside the world. Maybe she was like him in this: that she needed a partner. He could not be certain. But it felt like it.