Kim Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain

“I can try,” Kenzo said. “Here, let me…well, it looks like the boat belongs to the marina on Roosevelt Island.”

“That would make sense. Is there a phone number for it?”

“Let’s see—that should be in the Coast Guard records. Wait, they’re not open files. Hold a minute, please.”

Kenzo loved these little problems. Frank waited, trying not to hold his breath. Another instinctive act. As he waited he tried to etch the woman’s face again on his mind, thinking he might be able to get a portrait program to draw something like what he was remembering. She had looked serious and remote, like one of the Fates.

“Yeah, Frank, here it is. Do you want me to call it and pass you along?”

“Yes please, but write it down for me too.”

“Okay, I’ll pass you over and get off. I have to get back to it here.”

“Thanks Kenzo, thanks a lot.”

Frank listened, sticking a finger in his other ear. There was a pause, a ring. The ring had a rapid pulse and an insistent edge, as if it were designed to compete with the sounds of an inboard engine on a boat. Three rings, four, five; if an answering machine message came on, what would he say?

“Hello?”

It was her voice.

“Hello?” she said again.

He had to say something or she would hang up.

“Hi,” he said. “Hi, this is me.”

There was a static-filled silence.

“We were stuck in that elevator together in Bethesda.”

“Oh my God.”

Another silence. Frank let her assimilate it. He had no idea what to say. It seemed like the ball was in her court, and yet as the silence went on, a fear grew in him.

“Don’t hang up,” he said, surprising himself. “I just saw your boat go by, I’m here on the levee at the back of the Davis Highway. I called information and got your boat’s number. I know you didn’t want—I mean, I tried to find you afterward, but I couldn’t, and I could tell that you didn’t—that you didn’t want to be found. So I figured I would leave it at that, I really did.”

He could hear himself lying and added hastily, “I didn’t want to, but I didn’t see what else I could do. So when I saw you just now, I called a friend who got me the boat’s number. I mean how could I not, when I saw you like that.”

“I know,” she said.

He breathed in. He felt himself filling up, his back straightening. Something in the way she said “I know” brought it all back again. The way she had made it a bond between them.

After a time he said, “I wanted to find you again. I thought that our time in the elevator, I thought it was…”

“I know.”

His skin warmed. It was like a kind of St. Elmo’s fire running over him, he’d never felt anything like it.

“But—” she said, and he learned another new feeling; dread clutched him under the ribs. He waited as for a blow to fall.

The silence went on. An isolated freshet of rain pelted down, cleared, and then he could see across the wind-lashed Potomac again. A huge rushing watery world, awesome and dreamlike.

“Give me your number,” her voice said in his ear.

“What?”

“Give me your phone number,” she said again.

He gave her his number, then added, “My name is Frank Vanderwal.”

“Frank Vanderwal,” she said, then repeated the number.

“That’s it.”

“Now give me some time,” she said. “I don’t know how long.” And the connection went dead.

The second day of the storm passed as a kind of suspended moment, everything continuing as it had the day before, everyone in the area living through it, enduring, waiting for conditions to change. The rain was not as torrential, but so much of it had fallen in the previous twenty-four hours that it was still sheeting off the land into the flooded areas and keeping them flooded. The clouds continued to crash together overhead, and the tides were still higher than normal, so that the whole Piedmont region surrounding Chesapeake Bay was inundated. Except for immediate acts of a lifesaving nature, nothing could be done except to endure. All transport was drowned. The phones remained down, and power losses left hundreds of thousands without electricity. Escapes from drowning took precedence even over journalism (almost), and even though reporters from all over the world were converging on the capital to report on this most spectacular story—the capital of the hyperpower, drowned and smashed—most of them could only get as close as the edges of the storm, or the flood; inside that it was an ongoing state of emergency, and everyone was involved with rescues, relocations, and escapes of various kinds. The National Guard was out, all helicopters were enlisted into the effort; the video and digital imagery generated for the world to see was still incidental to other things; that in itself meant ordinary law had been suspended, and there was pressure to bring things back to all-spectacle all-the-time. Part of the National Guard found itself posted on the roads outside the region, to keep people from flooding the area as the water had.

Very early on the second morning it became evident that while most areas had seen high water already, the flooding of Rock Creek had not yet crested. That night its headwaters had received the brunt of one of the hardest downpours of the storm, and the already saturated land could only shed this new rainfall into the streambed. The creek’s drop to the Tidal Basin was precipitous in some places, and for most of its length the creek ran at the bottom of a narrow gorge carved into the higher ground of Northwest District. There was nowhere to hold an excess flow.

All this meant big trouble for the National Zoo, which was located on a sort of peninsula created by three turns in Rock Creek, and therefore directly overlooking the gorge. After the hard downpour in the night, the staff of the zoo congregated in the main offices to discuss the situation.

They had some visiting dignitaries on hand, who had been forced to spend the previous night there; several members of the embassy of the nation of Khembalung had come to the zoo the morning before, to take part in a ceremony welcoming two Bengal tigers brought from their country to the zoo. The storm had made it impossible for them to return to Virginia, but they had seemed happy to spend the night at the zoo, concerned as they were about their tigers, and the other animals as well.

Now they all watched together as one of the office’s computers showed images of Rock Creek’s gorge walls being torn away and washed downstream. Floating trees were catching in drifts against bridges over the creek, forming temporary impediments that forced water out into the flanking neighborhoods, until the bridges blew like failed dams, and powerful low walls of debris-laden water tore down the gorge harder than ever, ripping it away even more brutally. The eastern border of the zoo made it obvious how this endangered them: the light brown torrent was ripping around the park, just a few feet below the lowest levels of the zoo grounds. That plus the images on their computers made it ever more clear that the zoo was very likely to be overwhelmed, and soon. It looked like it was going to turn into something like a reversal of Noah’s flood, becoming one in which the people mostly survived, but two of every species were drowned.

The Khembali legation urged the National Park staffers to evacuate the zoo as quickly as possible. The time and vehicles necessary for a proper evacuation were completely lacking, of course, as the superintendent quickly pointed out, but the Khembalis replied that by evacuation they meant opening all the cages and letting the animals escape. The zookeepers were skeptical, but the Khembalis turned out to be experts in flood response, well-acquainted with the routines required in such situations. They quickly called up photos of the zookeepers of Prague, weeping by the bodies of their drowned elephants, to show what could happen if drastic measures were not taken. They then called up the Global Disaster Information Network, which had a complete protocol for this very scenario (threatened zoos), along with real-time satellite photos and flood data. It turned out that released animals did not roam far, seldom threatened humans (who were usually locked into buildings anyway), and were easy to re-collect when the waters subsided. And the data showed Rock Creek was certain to rise further.