Green Earth

Analysts on Wall Street, however, and in the big pharmaceuticals, and in relevant venture capital firms, could not be ignored. And while they weren’t saying anything directly, investment money started to go elsewhere. Torrey Pines’ stock fell, and because it was falling it fell some more, and then more again. Biotechs were fluky, and so far Torrey Pines had not generated any potential cash cows. They remained a start-up. Fifty-one million dollars was being swept under the rug, but the big lump in the rug gave it away to anyone who remembered what it was. No—Torrey Pines Generique was in trouble.

In Leo’s lab they had done what they could. Their job had been to get certain cell lines to become unnaturally prolific protein factories, and they had done that. Delivery wasn’t their part of the deal, and they weren’t physiologists, and now they didn’t have the wherewithal to do that part of the job. Torrey Pines needed a whole different wing for that, a whole different field of science. It was not an expertise that could be bought for $51 million. Or maybe it could have been, but Derek had bought defective expertise. And because of that, a multibillion-dollar cash-cow method was stalled right on the brink, and the whole company might go under.

Nothing Leo could do about it. He couldn’t even publish his results.

The Quiblers’ small house was located at the end of a street of similar houses. All of them stood blankly, blinds drawn, no clues given as to who lived inside. They could have been empty for all an outsider could tell: they could have been walled compounds in Saudi Arabia, hiding their life from the desert.

Walking these streets with Joe on his back, Charlie assumed that these houses were mostly owned by people who worked in the District, people who were always either working or on vacation. Their homes were places to sleep. Charlie had been that way himself before the boys had arrived. That was how people lived in Bethesda.

So he walked to the grocery store shaking his head as he always did. “It’s like a ghost town, Joe, it’s like some Twilight Zone episode in which we’re the only two people left on Earth.”

Then they rounded the corner, and all thought of ghost towns was rendered ridiculous. Shopping center. They walked into a giant Giant grocery store. Joe, excited by the place as always, stood up in his baby backpack, his knees on Charlie’s shoulders, and whacked Charlie on the ears as if he were directing an elephant. Charlie reached up, lifted him around and stuffed him into the baby seat of the grocery cart, then strapped him down with the cart’s little red seat belt. A very useful feature.

Okay. Buddhists coming to dinner. He had no idea what to cook. He assumed they were vegetarians. It was not unusual for Anna to invite people from NSF to dinner and then be somewhat at a loss as to the meal itself. Charlie liked that; he enjoyed cooking, though he was not good at it.

Now he decided to resuscitate an old recipe from their student years, pasta with an olive and basil sauce that a friend had first cooked for them in Italy. He wandered the familiar aisles of the store, looking for the ingredients. Joe’s presence disguised his tendency to talk to himself in public spaces. “Okay, whole peeled tomatoes, pitted kalamatas, olive oil extra virgin first cold press, it’s the first press zat really matter,” slipping into their friend’s Italian accent, “but you must never keel ze pasta, my God! Oh and bread. And wine, but not more than we can carry home, huh Joe.”

With groceries tucked into the backpack pocket under Joe’s butt, and slung in plastic bags from both hands, Charlie walked Joe back along the empty street to their house. Their street dead-ended in a little triangle of trees next to Woodson Avenue, a feeder road that poured its load of cars onto Wisconsin south. An old four-story apartment block wrapped around their backyard like a huge brick sound barrier, its stacked windows like a hundred live webcasts streaming all at once, daily lives that were much too partial and mundane to be interesting. No Rear Window here, and thank God for that. Each nuclear family in its domicile was inside its own pocket universe, millions of them scattered over the surface of the planet, like the dots of light in nighttime satellite photos.

On this night, however, the bubble containing the Quiblers was breached. Visitors, aliens! When the doorbell rang they almost didn’t recognize the sound.

Anna was occupied with Joe and a diaper upstairs, so Charlie left the kitchen and hurried through the house to answer the door. Four men in off-white cotton pants and shirts stood on the stoop, like visitors from Calcutta, except their vests were the maroon color Charlie associated with Tibetan monks. Joe had run to the top of the stairs, and he grabbed a banister to keep his balance, agog at the sight of them. In the living room Nick was struck shy, his nose quickly back into his book, but he was glancing over the top of it frequently as the strangers were ushered in around him. Charlie offered them drinks, and they accepted beers, and when he came back with those, Anna and Joe were downstairs and had joined the fun. Two of their visitors sat on the living room floor, laughing off Anna’s offer of the little couches, and they all put their beer bottles on the coffee table.

The oldest monk and the youngest one leaned back against the radiator, down at Joe’s level, and soon they were engaged with his vast collection of blocks—a heaping mound of plain or painted cubes, rhomboids, cylinders, and other polygons, which they quickly assembled into walls and towers, working with and around Joe’s Godzillalike interventions.

The young one, Drepung, answered Anna’s questions directly, and also translated for the oldest one, named Rudra Cakrin. He was the official ambassador of Khembalung, but while he was without English, apparently, his two middle-aged associates, Sucandra and Padma Sambhava, spoke it pretty well—not as well as Drepung, but adequately.

These two followed Charlie back out into the kitchen and stood there, beer bottles in hand, talking to him as he cooked. They stirred the unkilled pasta to keep the pot from boiling over, checked out the spices in the spice rack, and stuck their noses deep into the saucepot, sniffing with great interest and appreciation. Charlie found them surprisingly easy to talk to. They were about his age. Both had been born in Tibet, and both had spent years, they did not say how many, imprisoned by the Chinese, like so many other Tibetan Buddhist monks. They had met in prison, and after their release they had crossed the Himalayas and escaped Tibet together, afterward making their way gradually to Khembalung.

“Amazing,” Charlie kept saying to their stories. He could not help but compare them to his own relatively straightforward passage through the years. “And now after all that, you’re getting flooded?”

“Many times,” they said in unison. Padma, still sniffing Charlie’s sauce as if it were the perfect ambrosia, elaborated. “Used to happen only every eighteen years or about, moon tides, you know. We could plan it happening, and be prepared. But now, whenever the monsoon hits hard.”

“Also every month at moontide,” Sucandra added. “Certainly three, four times a year. No one can live that way for long. If it gets worse, then the island will no longer be habitable. So we came here.”

Charlie shook his head, tried to joke: “This place may be lower in elevation than your island.”

They laughed politely. Not the funniest joke. Charlie said, “Listen, speaking of elevation, have you talked to the other low-lying countries?”

Padma said, “Oh yes, we are part of the League of Drowning Nations, of course. Charter member.”

“Headquarters in The Hague, near the World Court.”

“Very appropriate,” Charlie said. “And now you are establishing an embassy here …”

“To argue our case, yes.”

Sucandra said, “We must speak to the hyperpower.”

The two men smiled cheerily.

“Well. That’s very interesting.” Charlie tested the pasta to see if it was ready. “I’ve been working on climate issues myself, for Senator Chase. I’ll have to get you in to talk to him. And you need to hire a good firm of lobbyists.”

They regarded him with interest. Padma said, “You think it best?”

“Yes. Definitely. You’re here to lobby the U.S. government, and there are pros in town to help foreign governments do that. I’ve got a good friend working for one of the better firms, I’ll put you in touch with him.”

Charlie slipped on potholders and lifted the pasta pot over to the sink, tipped it into the colander until it was overflowing. Always a problem with their little colander, which he never thought to replace except at moments like this. “I think my friend’s firm already represents the Dutch on these issues—oops—so it’s a perfect match. They’ll be knowledgeable about your problems.”

They nodded. “Thank you for that. We will enjoy that.”

They took the food into the little dining room, which was a kind of corner in the passageway between kitchen and living room, and with a great deal of to-and-froing all of them just managed to fit around the dining room table. Joe consented to a booster seat to get his head up to the level of the table, where he shoveled baby food industriously into his mouth or onto the floor, as the case might be, narrating the process all the while in his own tongue. Sucandra and Rudra Cakrin had seated themselves on either side of him, and they watched his performance with pleasure. Both attended to him as if they thought he was speaking a real language. They ate in a style that was not that dissimilar to his, Charlie thought—absorbed, happy, shoveling it in. The sauce was a hit with everyone but Nick, who ate his pasta plain.

Charlie got up and followed Anna out to the kitchen when she went to get the salad. He said to her under his breath, “I bet the old man speaks English too.”

“What?”

“It’s like in that Ang Lee movie, remember? The old man pretends not to understand English, but really he does? It’s like that I bet.”

Anna shook her head. “Why would he do that? It’s a hassle, all that translating. It doesn’t give him any advantage.”

“You don’t know that! Watch his eyes, see how he’s getting it all.”

“He’s just paying attention. Don’t be silly.”

“You’ll see.” Charlie leaned in to her conspiratorially: “Maybe he learned English in an earlier incarnation.”

“Quit it,” she said, laughing her low laugh. “You learn to pay attention like that.”

“Oh and then you’ll believe I understand English?”

“That’s right yeah.”

They returned to the dining room, laughing, and found Joe holding forth in a language anyone could understand, a language of imperious gesture and commanding eye, and the assumption of authority in the world. Which worked like a charm over them all, even though he was babbling.

After the salad they returned to the living room and settled around the coffee table again. Anna brought out tea and cookies. “We’ll have to have Tibetan tea next time,” she said.

The Khembalis nodded uncertainly.

“An acquired taste,” Drepung suggested. “Not actually tea.”

“Bitter,” Padma said appreciatively.

“You can use as blood coagulant,” Sucandra said.

Drepung added, “Also we add yak butter to it, aged until a bit rancid.”

“The butter has to be rancid?” Charlie said.