Fifty Degrees Below (20 page)

They made a rising turn over the island, and the view came back and went away, came back and went away. Joe leaned from Anna’s arms to the window, trying to see better. Nick was looking out the same window from the seat behind. The sea was a dark brown, and on the island everything was soaked, gray-green fields lined with standing water—trees, rooftops, the plaza with the reflecting pool, all deep in shadow; then the ocean again, clearly as high as the dike. “There’s where we were staying!” Nick called, pointing.

They banked in a gyre that cut through the bottom layers of the clouds. Dark, light, rain, clear, they flew from one state to the next. Rain skittered across the outside of the glass in sudden streaming deltas. They saw the ferries at the dock on the north side of the island; they were casting off, and Drepung shouted something up to the pilots. He gave the Quiblers a thumbs-up. Then the helo continued its curve, and they saw other outer islands of the Sundarban archipelago, many of them submerged by the flood already and no more than shallow reefs. The channels between these were a pale brown, flecked with dirty white.

They curved back over Khembalung and saw that the dike had been breached on its southwest curve, where it faced the battering of the storm surf. Brown water, heavily flecked with foam, poured whitely down onto the fields below the break, in its rush clearly ripping the gap in the dike wider. Soon Khembalung would look like all the other Sundarbans.

Now Joe crawled onto Charlie’s lap and took a death grip on Charlie’s neck, moaning or keening, it was hard to hear in all the racket, but somehow the sound of it cut through everything else. Charlie forced the hands on his neck to loosen their grip. “It’s okay!” he said loudly to the boy. “It’ll be okay! They’re all okay! They’re on the boats. Big boats! The
people
were
on
the
boats
! All the
people
were
on
the
boats
.”

“Da, da, da,” Joe moaned, or maybe it was “Na, da, na.” He put a hand on the window.

“Oh my God,” Charlie said.

Over Joe’s head he could see again the gap where the ocean was pouring in; it was already much wider than before. It looked like the whole southwest curve would go. Already most of the interior fields were sheeted with foamy water.

Ahead of them the pilot and copilot were shouting into their headsets. The helo tilted, spiraled higher. Clouds interrupted their view below. A loud buffeted ascent, then they caught sight of Khembalung again, from higher than before; through a break in the clouds it looked like a shallow green bowl, submerged in brown water until only an arc of the bowl’s rim remained in air.

Charlie said, “Don’t, Joe! I have to breathe.”

“Ah gone! Ah gone!”

Abruptly the helicopter tilted away, and all they could see outside the window was cloud. The Sundarbans were gone, all their mangrove swamps drowned, all their tigers swimming. The helo flew off like a blown leaf. Joe buried his face in Charlie’s chest and sobbed.

IV

IS THERE A TECHNICAL SOLUTION?

N
o one thinks it will ever happen to them until suddenly they are in the thick of it, thoroughly surprised to be there.

A tornado in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the third and catastrophic year of drought in Ireland; major floods on the Los Angeles River: these kinds of anomalies kept happening, at a rate of more than one a day around the world. Sooner or later almost everyone got caught up in some event, or lived in the midst of some protracted anomaly, for the weather events were both acute and chronic, a matter of hours or a matter of years.

Still it was hard to imagine it would ever happen to you.

At the poles the results were particularly profound, because of major and rapid changes in the ice. For reasons poorly understood, both polar regions were warming much faster than the rest of the planet. In the north this had resulted in the breakup of the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice, the imminent extinction of many species, including the polar bear, and the subsequent stall of the Gulf Stream. In the south it had resulted in the rapid breakup of the giant ice shelves hugging the Antarctic coast, unblocking the big glaciers falling into the Ross Sea so that they became “ice rivers,” moving so rapidly down their channels that they were destabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the biggest variable in the whole picture: if this sheet came off its underwater perch on the sea floor, the world would suffer impacts greater by far than what had been witnessed already, most especially a rapid rise in sea level, up to as much as seven meters if the whole sheet came off.

Still it was hard to imagine it would ever happen to you.

There were further ramifications. The ocean bottom, where it drops from the continental shelves to the abyssal seafloor, is in many places a steep slope, and these slopes are coated by thick layers of mud that contain methane in the form of clathrates, a chemical form of freezing that cages molecules of the gas in a frozen matrix. As ocean temperatures rose, these chemical cages were being destabilized, and release of the methane could then cause underwater avalanches in which even more methane was released, rising through the water and rejoining the atmosphere, where it was a greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide. Warmer atmosphere meant warmer ocean meant released methane meant warmer atmosphere meant—

A complex of cycles—geologic, oceanic, and atmospheric—all blending into each other and affecting the rest. The interactions were so complex, the feedbacks positive and negative so hard to gauge in advance, the unforeseen consequences so potentially vast, that no one could say what would happen next to the global climate. Modeling had been attempted to estimate the general rise in temperature, and actually these had been refined to the point that there was some agreement as to the outside parameters of possible change, ranging from about a two to an eleven degree C. rise in temperatures—a very big range, but that’s how uncertain any estimates had to be at this point. And even if the estimates could have been tighter, global averages did not reveal much about local or ultimate effects, as people were now learning. There were nonlinear tipping points, and now some of these were beginning to reveal themselves. The stall of the Gulf Stream was expected to chill the temperature in the northern hemisphere, especially on both sides of the Atlantic; further effects were much less certain. The recent two-year failure of the monsoon was not understood, nor its violent return, and the effects of both, having devastated communities all across south Asia and beyond, in Africa and southeast Asia, would create still further effects as yet unforeseen. China’s drought was ongoing, as was the longest-ever El Niño, now called the Hyperniño. Desertification in the Sahel was moving south at an ever-increasing rate, and South America was suffering the worst floods in recorded history because of the rain brought by the El Niño. It had rained in the Atacama.

Wild weather everywhere. The most expensive insurance year ever, for the eighth year in a row, and by more than ever. That was just a number, an amount of money distributed out through the financial systems of the world by insurance of all kinds; but it was also a measure of catastrophe, death, suffering, fear, insecurity, and sheer massive inconvenience.

The problem they faced was that everything living depended on conditions staying within certain tight climactic parameters. The atmosphere was only so thick; as Frank put it once, talking to Anna and Kenzo, when you drive by Mount Shasta on US Interstate 5, you can see the height of the livable part of the atmosphere right there before your eyes. No permanent human settlement on Earth was higher than Shasta’s summit, at 14,200 feet, so the mountain served to show in a very visible form just how thick the breathable atmosphere was—and the mountain wasn’t very tall at all, in comparison to the immense reach of the plateau the highway ran over, or to the height of the sky above. It was just a snowy hill! It was sobering, Frank said; after you saw the matter that way, looking at the mountain and sensing the size of the whole planet, you were changed. Ever afterward you would be aware of an invisible ceiling low overhead containing all the breathable air under it—the atmosphere thus no more than the thinnest wisp of a skin, like cellophane wrapped ever so tightly to the lithosphere. An equally thin layer of water had liquefied in the low basins of this lithosphere, and that was the life zone: cellophane wrapping a planet, a mere faint exhalation, wisping off into space. Frank would shake his head, remembering it.

Still, it was hard to imagine.

FRANK’S HABITS WERE HIS HOME NOW, and so the trip to Khembalung and its aftermath made him feel a bit homeless all over again. What to do with the day; again this became a question he had to answer anew, hour by hour, and it could be hard.

On the other hand, all the Khembali refugees flying into Washington helped him keep things in perspective. He was homeless by choice, they were not; he had his van, his tree, his office, his club—all the rooms of his house-equivalent, scattered around town; they had nothing. Their embassy’s house in Arlington gave them temporary shelter, but everything there was in cheek-by-jowl crisis mode, and would be for a long time.

And yet they were cheerful in their manner. Frank found this impressive, though he also wondered how long it would last. Doubly exiled, first from Tibet, then from their island; now, he thought, they would join the many other refugee groups who had come to Washington to plead their case in an attempt to get back to their homes, then failed and never left, adding their children, cuisine, and holidays to the metro region’s rich mix.

Because Khembalung was wrecked. There was talk of draining the island and repairing the dike, but there was no ready source of electricity to drive the pumps, no equipment available to rebuild the dike; and though those problems could be dealt with, maybe, their fresh-water supply appeared to have been compromised as well; and the island was being thoroughly saturated by seawater; and the longer things were submerged, the worse the damage got.

Above all, Khembalung was simply too low. It had always been too low, the Sundarbans were swampy islands, seasonally wetlands; and now, with the ocean’s average level rising, the margin of safety had disappeared. No matter what they did, catastrophic floods were bound to inundate all the Sundarbans again and again. Moon tides, storm surges, even the occasional tsunamis, likely to become more frequent as methane clathrates warmed and triggered underwater landslides—all these would be flooding the coastal lowlands of the world more often.

So the immense expense and effort that would be necessary to pump out and rebuild Khembalung was not worth it. The Khembalis had other options: there were other Tibetan refugee colonies scattered around India, and the Khembalis themselves owned some land in the hills north of Calcutta. And some people at the embassy in D.C. were talking about buying land in the metro area, and settling there. Meanwhile, it could be said that all twelve thousand citizens of Khembalung had for their national territory just one old Arlington house and an office in the NSF building.

So it was a crowded house and office. Frank was always amazed to see just how crowded they were. He dropped by often to say hi, and see if there was anything he could do to help, and every time he was struck anew at how many people could be crammed into a place without breaking anything but zoning codes. Carrying boxes from delivery trucks into the kitchen, talking to Rudra in English, getting the old man to teach him some Tibetan words. Frank was always happy to see them, and always happy to get out of there—to be able to drive over the Potomac to Rock Creek and the refuge of the forest.

The late summer days were still pretty long, and this was good, because Frank needed the light. He hiked into the park checking in on his FOG phone, getting the latest fixes and hoping he could locate the gibbons, whom he had learned were a family, Bert and May and their kids, or the siamangs; but any of the ferals would do. In the last hour before sundown many of them made their way to the watering hole in the gorge for a last drink for the night, and he often had good luck spotting them. Ostrich, tapir, spider monkey, eland, sitatunga, tamarin, red deer, brown bear; his personal list of sightings kept growing.

His Acheulian hand axe came in the mail at work, and he pulled it out of its bubble wrap and held it up to the light. Instantly it was his favorite rock. It had a lovely weight, and fitted his hand perfectly; it was the classic Acheulian oval, with a sharp tip at its smaller end. Chipped on both sides very expertly, so that it seemed as much a work of sculpture as a tool, a little Andy Goldsworthy sculpture; a petroglyph all by itself, speaking in its heft a whole world. The people who made it. Gray quartzite, slightly translucent, the chipped faces almost as smoothed by patination during their four hundred thousand years of exposure as the browned curve of original core. It was beautiful.

He took it to the park and pulled it from his daypack to show to Spencer and Robin and Robert the next time they ran, and they spontaneously fell to their knees to honor it, crying out wordlessly, like the gibbons. “Ahh! Ahh! Oh my God. Oh God, here it is.” Robin salaamed to it, Spencer inspected every chip and curve, kissing it from time to time. “Look how perfect it is,” he said.

“Look,” Robin said when he held it, “it’s shaped for a left-hander, see? It fits a lot better when you hold it in your left hand.” Robin was left-handed. “Do you think maybe
Homo erectus
were all left-handed?” he went on. “Like polar bears? Polar bears are all left-handed, did you know that?”

“Only because you’ve told us a thousand times,” Spencer said, taking it from him. “How old did you say?” he asked Frank.

“Four hundred thousand years.”

“Unbelievable. But look, you know—I really hate to say this—but it doesn’t look like it would fly like a frisbee.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Also, that thing about how it wouldn’t make a very good hand axe, because it’s sharpened all the way around? Actually it seems to me you could hold it almost anywhere and still hit something without cutting your hand. The edge isn’t sharp enough.”

“True.”

“Have you tried throwing it yet?”

“No.”

“Well heck, let’s give it a try.”

“Let’s throw it at a rabbit!”

“Now come on.”

“Hey we have to test this thing, how else are we going to do it? Throw it at one of those tapirs, it’ll bounce right off them.”

“No it won’t.”

“You kill it you eat it.”

“Fine by me!”

They ran the course, and when they came to the meadow near picnic site 14, they stopped and Frank pulled out the axe, and they threw it at a tree (it left an impressive gash) and then at trash bottles set up on a log. Yes, you could break a bottle with it, if you could hit it; and it did tend to spin on its axis, though not necessarily horizontally; in fact it tended to rotate through a spiral as it flew forward.

“You could kill a rabbit if you hit it.”

“True with an ordinary rock though.”

“You could spook a big animal by the watering hole.”

“True with an ordinary rock though.”

“All right, okay.”

“It’d work to skin an animal I guess.”

“That’s true,” Frank said. “But they’ve tried that in South Africa, and they’ve found that they lose their edge really quick, like after one animal.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s what they found. That’s why they think there might be so many of them. They think they used to just knap a new one pretty much any time they needed to do something.”

“Hmm, I don’t know. This thing looks pretty perfect for a throwaway. It looks like someone’s favorite tool.”

“His Swiss Army knife.”

“That’s just patination. It’s four hundred thousand years old, man. That’s
old
. Older than art and religion, like you said.”

“It
is
art and religion.”

“A fossilized frisbee.”

“Fossil killer frisbee.”