Kim Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain

And not just there. The flood had filled Rock Creek to the top of its deep but narrow ravine, and now water was pouring over at the sharp bends the gorge took while dropping through the city to the Potomac. Cameras on the bridges at M Street caught the awesome sight of the creek roaring around its final turn west, upstream from M Street, and pouring over Francis Junior High School and straight south on 23rd Street into Foggy Bottom, joining the lake covering the Mall.

Then on to a different channel, a different camera. The Watergate Building was indeed a curving water gate, like a remnant portion of a dam. The wave-tossed spate of the Potomac poured around its big bend looking as if it could knock the building down. Likewise the Kennedy Center just south of it. The Lincoln Memorial, despite its pedestal mound, appeared to be flooded up to about Lincoln’s feet. Across the Potomac the water was going to inundate the lower levels of Arlington National Cemetery. Reagan Airport was completely gone.

“Unbelievable.”

Charlie went back to the view out their window. The water was still there. A voice on the TV was saying something about a million acre-feet of water converging in the metropolitan area, partially blocked in its flow downstream by the high tide. With more rain predicted.

Out the window Charlie saw that people were already taking to the streets around them in small watercraft, despite the wind and drizzle. Zodiacs, kayaks, a waterski boat, canoes, rowboats; he saw examples of them all. Then as the evening wore on, and the dim light left the air below the black clouds, the rain returned with its earlier intensity. It poured down in a way that surely made it dangerous to be on the water. Most of the small craft had appeared to be occupied by men who it did not seem had any good reason to be out there. Out for a lark—thrill-seekers, already!

“It looks like Venice,” Andrea said, echoing Charlie’s earlier thought. “I wonder what it would be like if it were like this all the time.”

“Maybe we’ll get to find out.”

“How high above sea level are we here?”

No one knew, but Evelyn quickly found and clicked a topographical map to her screen. They jammed around her to look at it, or to get the address to bring it up on their own screens.

“Look at that.”

“Ten feet above sea level? Can that be true?”

“That’s why they call it the Tidal Basin.”

“But isn’t the ocean like what, fifty miles away? A hundred?”

“Ninety miles downstream to Chesapeake Bay,” Evelyn said.

“I wonder if the Metro has flooded.”

“How could it not?”

“True. I suppose it must have in some places.”

“And if in some places, wouldn’t it spread?”

“Well, there are higher and lower sections. Seems like the lower ones would for sure. And anywhere the entries are flooded.”

“Well, yes.”

“Wow. What a mess.”

“Shit, I got here by Metro.”

Charlie said, “Me too.”

They thought about that for a while. Taxis weren’t going to be running either.

“I wonder how long it takes to walk home.”

But then again, Rock Creek ran between the Mall and Bethesda.

Hours passed. Charlie checked his e-mail frequently, and finally there was a note from Anna: we’re fine here glad to hear you’re set in the office, be sure to stay there until it’s safe, let’s talk as soon as the phones will get through love, A and boys

Charlie took a deep breath, feeling greatly reassured. When the topo map had come up he had checked Bethesda first, and found that the border of the District and Maryland at Wisconsin Avenue was some two hundred and fifty feet above sea level. And Rock Creek was well to the east of it. Little Falls Creek was closer, but far enough to the west not to be a concern, he hoped. Of course Wisconsin Avenue itself was probably a shallow stream of sorts now, running down into Georgetown—and wouldn’t it be great if snobbish little Georgetown got some of this, but wouldn’t you know it, it was on a rise overlooking the river, in the usual correlation of money and elevation. Higher than the Capitol by a good deal. It was always that way; the poor people lived down in the flats, as witness the part of Southeast in the valley of the Anacostia River, now flooded from one side to the other.

It continued to rain. The phone connections stayed busy and no calls got through. People in Phil’s office watched the TV, stretched out on couches, or even lay down to catch some sleep on chair cushions lined on the floor. Outside the wind abated, rose again, dropped. Rain fell all the while. All the TV stations chattered on caffeinistically, talking to the emptied darkened rooms. It was strange to see how they were directly involved in an obviously historical moment, right in the middle of it in fact, and yet they too were watching it on TV.

Charlie could not sleep, but wandered the halls of the big building. He visited with the security team at the front doors, who had been using rolls of Department of Homeland Security gas-attack tape to try to waterproof the bottom halves of all the doors. Nevertheless the ground floor was getting soggy, and the basement even worse, though clearly the seal was fairly good, as the basement was by no means filled to the ceiling. Apparently over in the Smithsonian buildings there were hundreds of people moving stuff upstairs from variously flooding situations. People in their building mostly worked at screens or on laptops, though now some reported that they were having trouble getting online. If the Internet went down they would be completely out of touch.

Finally Charlie got itchy enough from his walking, and tired enough from his already acute lack of sleep, to go back to Phil’s office and lie down on a couch and try to sleep.

Gingerly he rested his fiery side on some couch cushions. “Owwwwww.” The pain made him want to weep, and all of a sudden he wanted to be home so badly that he couldn’t think about it. He moaned to think of Anna and the boys. He needed to be with them; he was not himself here, cut off from them. This was what it felt like to be in an emergency of this particular kind—scarcely able to believe it, but aware nevertheless that bad things could happen. The itching tortured him. He thought it would keep him from getting to sleep; but he was so tired that after a period of weird hypnagogic tossing and turning, during which the memory of the flood kept recurring to him like a bad dream that he was relieved to find was not true, he drifted off.

ACROSS THE great river it was different. Frank was at NSF when the storm got bad. He had gotten authorization from Diane to convene a new committee to report to the Board of Directors; his acceptance of the assignment had triggered a whole wave of communications to formalize his return to NSF for another year. His department at UCSD would be fine with it; it was good for them to have people working at NSF.

Now he was sitting at his screen, Googling around, and for some reason he had brought up the website for Small Delivery Systems, just to look. While tapping through its pages he had come upon a list of publications by the company’s scientists; this was often the best way to tell what a company was up to. And almost instantly his eye picked out one coauthored by Dr. P. L. Emory, CEO of the company, and Dr. F. Taolini.

Quickly he typed “consultants” into the search engine, and up came the company’s page listing them. And there she was: Dr. Francesca Taolini, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Biocomputational Studies.

“Well I’ll be damned.”

He sat back, thinking it over. Taolini had liked Pierzinski’s proposal; she had rated it “Very Good,” and argued in favor of funding it, persuasively enough that at the time it had given him a little scare. She had seen its potential…