Kim Stanley Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below

Phil laughed to hear it. ‘You’ve got a lie detector there.’

‘Going off all the time, in this company.’

‘Ha ha. Looks like he’s waking up.’

Charlie glanced over his shoulder. ‘I better start walking.’

‘I’ll join you. I can’t stand any more of this anyway.’

They were at the Vietnam Memorial, attending a ceremony to mark its reopening. Phil, a veteran who had served as an Army reporter in Saigon for a year, had said a few words; then the President had shown up, but only near the end, the feeling among his people being that this was one memorial that would be better left buried in the mud. After that Phil was forgotten by the press on hand, which did not surprise him; but Charlie could tell by the slight tightness at the corner of his mouth that the calculated back of the hand to Vietnam had irritated him.

In any case they were free to leave. Normally Phil would have been whisked by car up the Mall to his offices, but a cancellation had opened a half-hour slot in his schedule. ‘Let’s go say hi to Abe,’ he muttered, and turned them west. Offering this gift of time to Charlie; it was as close to an apology as Charlie would ever get.

A month earlier, right before the flood, Charlie had helped craft a giant bill for Phil, designed to jumpstart a real engagement with the climate change problem. Then, in the last phase of intense committee negotiations, Phil had dismantled the bill to get a small part of it passed, effectively destroying the rest. He had promised Charlie he wouldn’t, but he had; and had done so without warning Charlie he was going to.

At the time Charlie had been furious. Phil had shrugged him off. ‘I am only doing the necessary,’ he said, in his version of an Indian accent. ‘I must first be doing the necessary.’

But Charlie did not believe it had been necessary. And it did not help that since the flood Phil had been widely hailed as a prophet on the climate issue. Phil had laughed at this little irony, had thanked Charlie, had ignored with aplomb all Charlie’s explicit and implied I-told-you-sos. ‘It’s all really a compliment to you, Charles – to you and your unworkable brilliance.’

‘Um hmm,’ Charlie said. ‘Yeah right.’

He was enjoying the situation too much to invent his side of the banter. Two old colleagues, out for a walk to the Lincoln Monument; it was the rarest thing in town.

Landscaping equipment dotted the newly restored bank of the Potomac, and the background buzz of the city was augmented by their noise. The violent diesel huffing and puffing might have startled some sleeping children awake, but it served as a lullaby to Joe Quibler; the noise of trucks shifting gears on Wisconsin was his usual soporific, and he loved all big grinding sounds. So now he snoozed happily on, head nestled into the back of Charlie’s neck as they approached the memorial.

This part of the Mall had been twenty feet under the rush of the Potomac during the flood, and being landfill to begin with it had not put up very much resistance to the spate; much of it had been torn away, leaving the Lincoln Memorial an island in the stream. ‘Check it out,’ Charlie said to Phil, pointing up at the big white foursquare building. There was a dark horizontal line partway up it. ‘High water mark. Twenty-three feet above normal.’

Phil frowned at the sight. ‘You know, the goddammed House is never going to appropriate enough money to clean up this city.’

Senators and their staffs often had an immense disdain for the House of Representatives. ‘True.’

‘It’s too much like one of their Bible prophecies, what was that one?’

‘Noah’s flood? Revelation?’

‘Maybe. Anyway they’re loving it. No way they’re going to allocate money to interfere with God’s judgment. That would be bad. That would be worse than, than what – than raising taxes! ’

‘Joe’ll wake up if you yell like that.’

‘Sorry. I’ll calm down.’

Joe rolled his head on Charlie’s neck. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Ha,’ Phil said, grinning. ‘Caught in another one.’

Charlie could just glimpse the boy’s red cheek and furrowed brow. He could feel Joe’s agitation; clearly he was once more locked into one of his mighty dreams, which from his sleeping scowls and jerks appeared to be fierce struggles, filled with heartfelt Nos . Joe awakened from them with big sighs of relief, as if escaping to a quieter, lesser reality, a kind of vacation cosmos. It worried Charlie.

Phil noticed Joe’s distress, patted his damp head. Step by broad step they ascended the Memorial.

To Phil this place was sacred ground. He loved Lincoln, had studied his life, often read in the nine volumes of his collected works. ‘This is a good place,’ he said as he always did when visiting the memorial. ‘Solid. Foursquare. Like a dolmen. Like the Parthenon.’

‘Especially now, with all the scaffolding.’

Phil looked in at the big statue, still stained to the knees, a sight that made him grimace. ‘You know, this city and the Federal government are synonymous. They stand for each other, like when people call the administration “the White House”. What is that, metonymy?’

‘Metonymy or synecdoche, I can never remember which.’

‘No one can.’ Phil walked inside, stopped short at the sight of the stained inner walls. ‘Damn it. They are going to let this city sink back into the swamp it came out of.’

‘That’s synecdoche I think. Or the pathetic fallacy.’

‘Pathetic for sure, but how is it patriotic? How do they sell that? ’

‘Please Phil, you’re gonna wake him up. They have it both ways, you know. They use code phrases that mean something different to the Christian right than to anyone else.’

‘Like the beast will be slain or whatnot?’

‘Yes, and sometimes even more subtle than that.’

‘Ha ha. Clerics, everywhere you look. Ours are as bad as the foreign ones. Make people hate their government at the same time you’re scaring them with terrorists, what kind of program is that?’ Phil drifted through the subdued crowd toward the left wall, into which was incised the Gettysburg Address. The final lines were obscured by the flood’s high water mark, a sight which made him scowl. ‘They had better clean this up.’

‘Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all.’

‘Abraham Lincoln was no Republican.’

‘Hello?’

‘The Republicans in Congress hated him like poison. The goddammed Copperheads did everything they could to sabotage him. They cheered when he was killed, because then they could claim him as a martyr and rip off the South in his name.’

‘Limited value in hitting them with that now.’

‘But it’s still happening! I mean whatever happened to government of the people by the people and for the people not perishing from this earth?’ Pointing at the marred lines on the wall, looking as heavily symbolic as an image in a Cocteau film.

‘An idea that lost?’ Charlie said, spurring him on.

‘Democracy can’t lose. It has to succeed.’

‘“Democracy will never succeed, it takes up too many evenings.”’

‘Ha. Who said that?’

‘Oscar Wilde.’

‘Please. I mean, I see his point, but don’t quote Oscar Wilde to me when I’m trying to think like Abraham Lincoln.’

‘Wilde may be more your level.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Wilde was witty just like that.’

‘Ha ha ha .’

Charlie gave up tweaking Phil in favor of contemplating the mud-stained statue of the sixteenth president. It was a great work: massive, brooding, uneasy. The big square-toed boots and obviously handmade broadcoat somehow evoked the whole world of the nineteenth century frontier. This was the spirit that America had given to the world – its best gesture, its exemplary figure.