Green Earth

It had only taken a few days of that to reduce him to a gibbering semi-hallucinatory state. Now, over a week later, it was worse. His eyes were sandy; things had auras around them; noises made him jump. It was like the dregs of a crystal meth jag, he imagined, or the last hours of an acid trip. A sandpapered brain, spacy and raw, everything leaping into it through the portals of his senses.

He took the Metro to Dupont Circle, got off there just to take a walk without Joe. He stopped at Kramer’s and got an espresso to go, then started around the circle to check the Dupont Second Story, but stopped when he realized he was doing exactly the things he would have done if he had had Joe with him.

He carried on southeastward instead, strolling down Connecticut toward the Mall. As he walked he admired a great spectacle of clouds overhead, vast towers of pearly white lobes blooming upward into a high pale sky.

He stopped at the wonderful map store on Eye Street, and for a while lost himself in the cloud shapes of other countries. Back outside the real clouds were growing in place rather than heaving in from the west or the southeast. Brilliant anvil heads were blossoming sixty thousand feet overhead, forming a hyper-Himalaya that looked as solid as marble.

He pulled out his phone and put it in his left ear. “Phone, call Roy.”

After a second: “Roy Anastophoulus.”

“Roy, it’s Charlie. I’m coming on in.”

“I’m not there.”

“Ah come on!”

“I know. When was the last time I actually saw you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going in for?”

“I need to talk to Phil. I had a dream this morning that I could convince anybody of anything, even Joe. I convinced Phil to reintroduce the Chinese aerosols bill, and then I got you to approve it.”

“That poison ivy has driven you barking mad.”

“Very true. It must be the steroids. I mean, the clouds today are like pulsing. They don’t know which way to go.”

“That’s probably right, there’s two low-pressure systems colliding here today, didn’t you hear?”

“How could I not.”

“They say it’s going to rain really hard.”

“Looks like I’ll beat it to the office, though.”

“Good. Hey listen, when Phil gets in, don’t be too hard on him. He already feels bad enough.”

“He does?”

“Well, no. Not really. I mean, when have you ever seen Phil feel bad about anything?”

“Never.”

“Right. But, you know. He would feel bad about this if he went in for that kind of thing. And you have to remember, he’s pretty canny at getting the most he can get from these bills. He sees the limits and then does what he can. It’s not a zero-sum game to him. He really doesn’t think of it as us-and-them.”

“But it is us-and-them.”

“True. But he takes the long view. Later some of the thems will be part of an us. And meanwhile, he finds some pretty good tricks. Breaking the superbill into parts might have been the way to go. We’ll get back a lot of this stuff later.”

“Maybe. We never tried the Chinese aerosols again.”

“Not yet.”

Charlie stopped listening to check the street he was crossing. When he started listening again Roy was saying, “So you dreamed you were Xenophon, eh?”

“How’s that?”

“Xenophon. He wrote the Anabasis, which tells the story of how he and a bunch of Greek mercenaries got stuck and had to fight their way across Turkey to get home to Greece. They argue the whole time about what to do, and Xenophon wins every argument, and all his plans always work perfectly. I think of it as the first great political fantasy novel. So who else did you convince?”