Forty Signs of Rain

‘Okay, I won’t keep you. I just wanted to check if we had any plans for next weekend.’

‘None that I know of.’

‘Okay, good. Because I had an interesting thing happen this morning, I met a bunch of people downstairs, new to the building. They’re like Tibetans, I think, only they live on an island. They’ve taken the office space downstairs that the travel agency used to have.’

‘That’s nice dear.’

‘Yes. I’m going to have lunch with them, and if it seems like a good idea I might ask them over for dinner sometime, if you don’t mind.’

‘No, that’s fine, snooks. Whatever you like. It sounds interesting.’

‘Great, okay. I’m going to go meet them soon, I’ll tell you about it.’

‘Okay, good.’

‘Okay, bye dove.’

‘Bye love, talk to you.’

Charlie clicked off.

After ten giant breaths he stood, lifting Joe in his arms. Joe buried his face in Charlie’s neck. Shakily Charlie retraced their course. It was somewhere between fifty and a hundred yards. Rivulets of sweat ran down his ribs, and off his forehead into his eyes. He wiped them against Joe’s shirt. Joe was sweaty too. When he reached their stuff Charlie swung Joe around, down into his backpack. For once Joe did not resist. ‘Sowy Da,’ he said, and fell asleep as Charlie swung him onto his back.

Charlie took off walking. Joe’s head rested against his neck, a sensation that had always pleased him before. Sometimes he would even suckle the tendon there. Now it was like the touch of some meaning so great that he couldn’t bear it, a huge cloudy aura of danger and love. He started to cry, wiped his eyes and shook it off, as if shaking away a nightmare. Hostages to fortune, he thought. You get married, have kids, you give up such hostages to fortune. No avoiding it, no help for it. It’s just the price you pay for such love. His son was a complete maniac, and it only made him love him more.

He walked hard for most of an hour, through all the neighborhoods he had come to know so well in his years of lonely Mr Momhood. The vestiges of an older way of life lay under the trees like a network of ley lines: railway beds, canal systems, Indian trails, even deer trails, all could be discerned. Charlie walked them sightlessly. The ductile world drooped around him in the heat. Sweat lubricated his every move.

Slowly he regained his sense of normality. Just an ordinary day with Joe and Da.

The residential streets of Bethesda and Chevy Chase were in many ways quite beautiful. It had mostly to do with the immense trees, and the grass underfoot. Green everywhere. On a weekday afternoon like this there was almost no one to be seen. The slight hilliness was just right for walking. Tall old hardwoods gave some relief from the heat; above them the sky was an incandescent white. The trees were undoubtedly second or even third growth, there couldn’t be many old-growth hardwoods anywhere east of the Mississippi. Still they were old trees, and tall. Charlie had never shifted out of his California consciousness, in which open landscapes were the norm and the desire, so that on the one hand he found the omnipresent forest claustrophobic – he pined for a pineless view – while on the other hand it remained always exotic and compelling, even slightly ominous or spooky. The dapple of leaves at every level, from the ground to the highest canopy, was a perpetual revelation to him; nothing in his home ground or in his bookish sense of forests had prepared him for this vast and delicate venation of the air. On the other hand he longed for a view of distant mountains as if for oxygen itself. On this day especially he felt stifled and gasping.

His phone beeped again, and he pulled the earplugs out of his pocket and stuck them in his ears, clicked the set on.

‘Hello.’

‘Hey Charlie, I don’t want to bug you, but are you and Joe okay?’

‘Oh yeah, thanks Roy. Thanks for checking back in, I forgot to call you.’

‘So you found him.’

‘Yeah I found him, but I had to stop him running into traffic, and he was upset and I forgot to call back.’

‘Hey, that’s okay. It’s just that I was wondering, you know, if you could finish off this draft with me.’

‘I guess.’ Charlie sighed. ‘To tell the truth, Roy boy, I’m not so sure how well this work-at-home thing is going for me these days.’

‘Oh you’re doing fine. You’re Phil’s gold standard. But look, if now isn’t a good time …’

‘No no, Joe’s asleep on my back. It’s fine. I’m still just kind of freaked out.’

‘Sure, I can imagine. Listen we can do it later, although I must say we do need to get this thing staffed out soon or else Phil might get caught short. Dr Strangelove –’ this was their name for the President’s science advisor ‘– has been asking to see our draft too.’

‘I know, okay talk to me. I can tell you what I think anyway.’

So for a while as he walked he listened to Roy read sentences from his draft, and then discussed with him the whys and wherefores, and possible revisions. Roy had been Phil’s chief of staff ever since Wade Norton hit the road and became an advisor in absentia, and after years of staffing for the House Resources committee (called the Environment committee until the Gingrich Congress renamed it), he was deeply knowledgeable, and sharp too; one of Charlie’s favourite people. And Charlie himself was so steeped now in the climate bill that he could see it all in his head, indeed it helped him now just to hear it, without the print before him to distract him. As if someone were telling him a bedtime story.

Eventually, however, some question of Roy’s couldn’t be resolved without the text before him. ‘Sorry. I’ll call you back when I get home.’

‘Okay but don’t forget, we need to get this finished.’

‘I won’t.’

They clicked off.

His walk home took him south, down the west edge of the Bethesda Metro district, an urban neighbourhood of restaurants and apartment blocks, all ringing the hole in the ground out of which people and money fountained so prodigiously, changing everything: streets rerouted, neighbourhoods redeveloped, a whole clutch of skyscrapers bursting up through the canopy and establishing another purely urban zone in the endless hardwood forest.

He stopped in at Second Story Books, the biggest and best of the area’s several used bookstores. It was a matter of habit only; he had visited it so often with Joe asleep on his back that he had memorized the stock, and was reduced to checking the hidden books in the inner rows, or alphabetizing sections that he liked. No one in the supremely arrogant and slovenly shop cared what he did there. It was soothing in that sense.

Finally he gave up trying to pretend he felt normal, and walked past the auto dealer and home. There it was a tough call whether to take the baby backpack off and hope not to wake Joe prematurely, or just to keep him on his back and work from the bench he had put by his desk for this very purpose. The discomfort of Joe’s weight was more than compensated for by the quiet, and so as usual he kept Joe snoozing on his back.

When he had his material open, and had read up on tidal power generation cost/benefit figures from the UN study on same, he called Roy back, and they got the job finished. The revised draft was ready for Phil to review, and in a pinch could be shown to Senator Winston or Dr Strangelove.

‘Thanks Charlie. That looks good.’

‘I like it too. It’ll be interesting to see what Phil says about it. I wonder if we’re hanging him too far out there.’

‘I think he’ll be okay, but I wonder what Winston’s staff will say.’

‘They’ll have a cow.’

‘It’s true. They’re worse than Winston himself. A bunch of Sir Humphreys if I ever saw one.’

‘I don’t know, I think they’re just fundamentalist know-nothings.’

‘True, but we’ll show them.’

‘I hope.’

‘Charles my man, you’re sounding tired. I suppose the Joe is about to wake up.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Unrelenting eh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you are the man, you are the greatest Mr Mom inside the Beltway!’