Kim Stanley Robinson - Green Earth

“Joe and Dad!” Charlie would say then. “Here we go! How about breakfast? Here—how about you get into your playpen for a second, and I’ll go warm up some of Mom’s milk.”

“No!”

This routine had worked like a charm with Nick, but Joe refused to associate with baby things, as being an affront to his dignity.

So now Charlie had Joe there with him in the kitchen, crawling underfoot or investigating the gate that blocked the stairs to the cellar. A human pinball. “Okay watch out now, don’t. Don’t! Your bottle will be ready in a second.”

“Ba!”

“Yes, bottle.”

This was satisfactory, and Joe plopped on his butt directly under Charlie’s feet. Charlie worked over him, taking some of Anna’s frozen milk out of the freezer and putting it in a pot of warming water on the stove. Anna had her milk stored in precise quantities of either four or ten ounces, in tall or short permanent plastic cylinders that were filled with disposable plastic bags, and capped by brown rubber nipples topped by snap-on plastic tops to protect the nipples from contamination in the freezer. There was a lab book on the kitchen counter for Charlie to fill out the times and amounts of Joe’s feedings. Anna liked to know these things, she said, to determine how much milk to pump at work, but Charlie felt that the real purpose was to fulfill Anna’s pleasure in making quantified records of any kind.

He was testing the temperature of the thawed milk by taking a quick suck on the nipple when his phone rang. He whipped on a headset and answered.

“Hi Charlie, it’s Roy.”

“Oh hi Roy, what’s up.”

“Well I’ve got your latest draft here and I’m about to read it, and I thought I’d check to see what I should be looking for.”

“Oh yeah. The new stuff that matters is all in the third section.”

The bill as Charlie had drafted it for Phil would require the United States to act on certain recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Did you kind of bury the part about us conforming to IPCC findings?”

“I don’t think there’s earth deep enough to bury that. I tried to make it look inevitable. International body we’re part of, climate change clearly real, the UN the best body to work through global issues, support for them pretty much mandatory or else the world cooks, that sort of thing.”

“Well, but that’s never worked before, has it? Come on, Charlie, this is Phil’s big pre-election bill and you’re his climate guy. If he can’t get this bill out of committee then we’re in big trouble.”

“Yeah I know. Wait just a second.”

Charlie took another test pull from the bottle. Now it was at body temperature, or almost.

“A bit early to be hitting the bottle, Charlie, what you drinking there?”

“Well, I’m drinking my wife’s breast milk, if you must know.”

“Say what?”

“I’m testing the temperature of one of Joe’s bottles. They have to be thawed to a very exact temperature or else he gets annoyed.”

“So you’re drinking your wife’s breast milk out of a baby bottle?”

“Yes I am.”

“How is it?”

“It’s good. Thin but sweet. A potent mix of protein, fat, and sugar. No doubt the perfect food.”

“I bet.” Roy cackled. “Do you ever get it straight from the source?”

“Well I try, sure, who doesn’t, but Anna doesn’t like it. She says it’s a mixed message and if I don’t watch out she’ll wean me when she weans Joe.”

“Aha. So you have to take the long-term view.”

“Yes. Although actually I tried it one time when Joe fell asleep nursing, so she couldn’t move without waking him. She was hissing at me and I was trying to get it to work but apparently you have to suck much harder than, you know, one usually would, there’s a trick to it, and I still hadn’t gotten any when Joe woke up and saw me. Anna and I froze, expecting him to freak out, but he just reached out and patted me on the head.”

“He understood!”

“Yeah. It was like he was saying I know how you feel, Dad, and I will share with you this amazing bounty. Didn’t you Joe?” he said, handing Joe the warmed bottle. He watched with a smile as Joe took it one-handed and tilted it back, elbow thrown out like Popeye with a can of spinach. Because of all the pinpricks Charlie had made in the rubber nipples, Joe could choke down a bottle in a few minutes, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in doing so. No doubt a sugar rush.

“Okay, well, you are a kinky guy my friend and obviously deep in the world of domestic bliss, but we’re still relying on you here and this may be the most important bill for Phil this session.”

“Come on, it’s a lot more than that, young man, it’s one of the few chances we have left to avoid complete global disaster, I mean—”

“Preaching to the converted! Preaching to the converted!”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Sure sure. Okay, I’ll read this draft and get back to you ASAP. I want to move on with this, and the committee discussion is now scheduled for Tuesday.”

“That’s fine, I’ll have my phone with me all day.”

“Sounds good, I’ll be in touch, but meanwhile be thinking about how to slip the IPCC thing in even deeper.”

“Yeah okay but see what I did already.”

“Sure bye.”

“Bye.”

Charlie pulled off the headset and turned off the stove. Joe finished his bottle, inspected it, tossed it casually aside.

“Man, you are fast,” Charlie said as he always did. One of the mutual satisfactions of their days together was doing the same things over and over, and saying the same things about them. Joe was not as insistent on pattern as Nick had been, in fact he liked a kind of structured variability, as Charlie thought of it, but the pleasure in repetition was still there.

Now Joe decided he would try again to climb the baby gate and dive down the cellar stairs, but Charlie moved quickly to detach him, then shooed him out into the dining room while cleaning up the counter, ignoring the loud cries of complaint.

“Okay okay! Quiet! Hey let’s go for a walk! Let’s go walk!”

“No!”

“Ah come on. Oh wait, it’s your day for Gymboree, and then we’ll go to the park and have lunch, and then go for a walk!”

“NO!”

But that was just Joe’s way of saying yes.

Charlie wrestled him into the baby backpack, which was mostly a matter of controlling his legs, not an easy thing. Joe was strong, a compact animal with bulging thigh muscles, and though not as loud a screamer as Nick had been, a tough guy to overpower. “Gymboree, Joe! You love it! Then a walk, guy, a walk to the park!”

Off they went.

First to Gymboree, located in a big building just off Wisconsin. Gymboree was a chance to get infants together when they did not have some other daycare to do it. It was an hour-long class, and always a bit depressing, Charlie felt, to be paying to get his kid into a play situation with other kids, but there it was; without Gymboree they all would have been on their own.

Joe disappeared into the tunnels of a big plastic jungle gym. It may have been a commercial replacement for real community, but Joe didn’t know that; all he saw was that it had lots of stuff to play with and climb on, and so he scampered around the colorful structures, crawling through tubes and climbing up things, ignoring the other kids to the point of treating them as movable parts of the apparatus, which could cause problems. “Oops, say you’re sorry, Joe. Sorry!”

Off he shot again, evading Charlie. He didn’t want to waste any time. The contrast with Nick could not have been more acute. Nick had seldom moved at Gymboree. One time he had found a giant red ball and stood embracing the thing for the full hour of the class. All the moms had stared sympathetically (or not), and the instructor, Ally, had done her best to help Charlie get him interested in something else; but Nick would not budge from his mystical red ball.