Fifty Degrees Below (48 page)

Charlie had always had a lot of sympathy for Buster Keaton. Life as a string of astonishing crises to be dealt with; it seemed right to him. He said, “Drepung?”

“Yes?”

Charlie inspected his torn hand. Drepung held his own hand next to it; both were chewed up by the day’s action.

“Speaking of Joe.”

“Yes?”

Charlie heaved a sigh. He could feel the worry that had built up in him. “I don’t want him to be any kind of special person for you guys.”

“What?”

“I don’t want him to be a reincarnated soul.”

“. . . Buddhism says we are all such.”

“I don’t want him to be any kind of reincarnated lama. Not a tulku, or a boddhisattva, or whatever else you call it. Not someone your people would have any religious interest in at all.”

Drepung inspected his palm. The skin was about the same color as Charlie’s, maybe more opaque. Let that stand for us, Charlie thought. At least as far as Charlie’s sight was concerned. He couldn’t tell what Drepung was thinking. Except it did seem that the young man didn’t know what to say.

This tended to confirm Charlie’s suspicions. He said, “You know what happened to the new Panchen Lama.”

“Yes. I mean no, not really.”

“Because nobody does! Because they picked a little boy and the Chinese took him and he has never been seen again. Two little boys, in fact.”

Drepung nodded, looking upset. “That was a mess.”

“Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

Drepung grimaced. “The Panchen Lama is the reincarnation of the Buddha Amitabha. He is the second most important spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism, and his relationship with the Dalai Lama has always been complicated. The two were often at odds, but they also helped to choose each other’s successors. Then in the last couple of centuries the Panchen Lama has often been associated with Chinese interests, so it got even more complicated.”

“Sure,” Charlie said.

“So, when the tenth Panchen Lama died, in 1989, the identification of his next reincarnation was obviously a problem. Who would make the determination? The Chinese government told the Panchen Lama’s monastery, Tashilhunpo, to find the new reincarnation. So, that was proper, but they also made it clear they would have final approval of the choice made.”

“On what basis?”

“Well, you know. To control the situation.”

“Ah yes. Of course.”

“So Chadrel Rimpoche, the head of the Tashilhunpo Monastery, contacted the Dalai Lama in secret, to get his help in making the choice, as was proper in the tradition. His group had already identified several children in north Tibet as possibilities. So the Dalai Lama performed divinations to discover which of them was the new Panchen Lama. He found that it was a boy living near Tashilhunpo. The signs were clear. But now the question was, how were they going to get that candidate approved by the Chinese, while also hiding the involvement of the Dalai Lama.”

“Couldn’t Chadrel Rimpoche just tell the Chinese that’s who it was?”

“Well, but the Chinese had introduced a system of their own. It involves a thing called the Golden Urn. When there are any uncertainties, and those are easy to create, then the three top names are put into this urn. The name drawn from the urn is destined to be the correct one.”

“What?” Charlie cried. “They draw the name out of a hat?”

“Out of an urn. Yes.”

“But that’s crazy! I mean presumably if there is a reincarnated lama in one of these kids, he is who he is! You can’t be drawing a name from a hat.”

“One would suppose. But the Chinese have never been averse to harming Tibetan traditions, as you know. Anyway, in this case the Dalai Lama’s divination was a boy in a region under Chinese control, so it seemed as if chances for his confirmation were fairly good. But there was concern that the Chinese would use the urn to deliberately choose someone other than the one Chadrel Rimpoche recommended, just to show they were in control, and to deny the Dalai Lama any possible influence.”

“Sure. And so?”

“And so, the Dalai Lama eventually decided to announce the identity of the boy, thinking that the Chinese would then be pressured to conform to Tibetan wishes, but satisfied that it was a boy living under their control.”

“Oh no,” Charlie said. “I’m surprised anyone could have thought that, knowing the Chinese.”

Drepung sighed. “It was a gamble. The Dalai Lama must have felt that it was the best chance they had.”

“But it didn’t work.”

“No.”

“So what happened to the boy?”

“He and his parents were taken into custody. Chadrel Rimpoche also.”

“Where are they now?”

“No one knows. They have not been seen since that time.”

“Now see? I don’t want Joe to be any part of that sort of thing!”

Drepung sighed. Finally he said, “The Panchen Lama is a special case, very highly politicized, because of the Chinese. Many returned lamas are identified without any such problems.”

“I don’t care! Besides, you can’t be sure whether it will get complicated or not.”

“No Chinese are involved.”

“I don’t care!”

Drepung hunched forward a little, as if to say, What can I do, I can’t do anything.

“Look,” Charlie said. “It’s upsetting Anna. She doesn’t believe in anything you can’t see or quantify, you know that. It upsets her even to try. You make this kind of stuff be about Joe and it will just freak her out. She’s trying not to think about it right now, I can tell, but even that is freaking her out. She’s not good at not thinking about things. She thinks about things.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be. I mean, think of it this way. If she hadn’t befriended you guys like she did when you first came here, then you would never even have known Joe existed. So in effect you are punishing Anna for her kindness to you.”

Drepung pursed his lips, hummed unhappily. He looked like he had while climbing: unhappy, faced with a problem.

“Besides,” Charlie pressed, “the whole idea that your kid is somehow not just, you know, your kid—that he’s someone else somehow—that in itself is upsetting. Offensive, one might even say. I mean he is a reincarnation already, of me and Anna.”

“And your ancestors.”

“Right, true. But anyone else, no.”

“Hmmm.”

“But you see what I mean? How it feels?”

“Yes.” Drepung nodded, rocking his whole body forward and back. “Yes, I do.”

They sat there, looking down at the river. A lone kayaker was working her way upstream against the white flow. Below them Frank, who was standing by the shore again, was staring out at her.

Charlie gestured down at Frank. “He seems interested.”

“Indeed he does.”

They watched Frank watch her.

“So,” Charlie persevered, “maybe you could talk to Rudra Cakrin about this matter for me. See if he can do something, see if there is some kind of, I don’t know, exorcism he can do. Not that I mean to imply anything, just some kind of I don’t know. Re-individuation ceremony. To clear him out, and well—leave him alone. Are there such ceremonies?”

“Well . . . in a manner of speaking, yes. I suppose.”

“So will you talk to Rudra about doing it? Maybe just without much fanfare, so Anna doesn’t know about it?”

Drepung was frowning. “If she doesn’t know, then . . .”

“Then it would be for me. Yes. For me and Joe. And then it would get to Anna, by way of us. Why, does it have to be public?”

“No no. It’s not that.”

“What—you don’t want to talk to Rudra about it?”

“Well . . . Rudra would not actually be the one to decide about such a matter.”

“No?” Charlie was surprised. “Who then? Someone back in Khembalung, or Tibet?”

Drepung shook his head.

“Well, who then?”

Drepung lifted his hand as if to inspect it again. He pointed the bloodied thumb at himself. Looked at Charlie.

Charlie shifted on the ground to get a better look back at him. “What, you?”

Drepung nodded with his body again.

Charlie laughed shortly. All of a sudden many things were becoming clear. “Why you rascal you!” He gave the young man a light shove. “You guys have been running a scam on us the whole time.”

“No no. Not a scam.”

“So what is Rudra then, some kind of servant, some old retainer you’re doing a prince-and-pauper switch with?”

“No, not at all. He is a tulku too. But not so, that is to say, in the Khembali order there are also relationships between tulkus, like the ones between the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.”

“So you’re the boss, you’re saying.”

Drepung winced. “Well. I am the one the others regard as their, you know. Leader.”

“Spiritual leader? Political leader?”

Drepung wiggled a hand.

“What about Padma and Sucandra?”

“They are in effect like regents, or they were. Like brothers now, advisors. They tell me so much, they are like my teachers. Brothers really.”

“I see. And so you stay behind the scenes here.”

“Or, in front of the scenes really. The greeter.”

“Both in front and behind.”

“Yes.”

“Very clever. It’s just what I thought all along.”

“Really?”

“No. I thought Rudra spoke English.”

Drepung nodded. “His English is not so bad. He has been studying. Though he does not like to admit it.”

“But listen, Drepung—you do these kinds of switches and cover stories and all, because you know it’s a little dangerous out there, right? Because of the Chinese and all?”

Drepung pursed his lips. “Well, not so much for that—”

“And think about it like this—
you
know what it means to suddenly be called someone else! You must.”

At this Drepung blinked. “Yes. It’s true. I remember my parents. . . . My father was really happy for me. For all of us, really proud. But my mother was never really reconciled. She would put my hand on her and say, ‘You came from here. You came from here.’ ”

“What do they think now?”

“They are no longer in those bodies.”

“Ah.” He seemed young to have lost both parents. But who knew what they had lived through. Charlie said, “Anyway, you know what I’m talking about.”

“Yes.”

For a long time they sat in the misty rumble of the great falls, looking down at Frank, who had now unclipped from his rope, and was walking over the jumbled rocks by the water, attempting, it appeared, to keep the kayaker in sight as she approached the foot of the falls proper.

Charlie pressed on. “Will you do something about this then?”

Drepung rocked again. Charlie was beginning to wonder if it signaled assent or not. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Now don’t you be giving me that!”

“What? Oh! Oh, no, no, I meant it for real!”

They both laughed, thinking about Phil Chase and his
I’ll see what I can do
s. “They all say it,” Charlie complained.

“Now, now. They
are
seeing what they can do. You must give them that.”

“I don’t give them that. They’re seeing what they
can’t
do.”

Drepung waggled a hand, smiling. He too had had to put people off, Charlie saw.

They leaned out to try and spot Frank.

As they peered down, Charlie found that he felt better. Talking with someone else about this matter had eased the sense of isolation that had been oppressing him. He wasn’t used to having something he couldn’t talk to Anna about, and without her, he had been at a loss.

And the news that Drepung was the true power in Khembali affairs, once he got over it, was actually quite reassuring. Rudra Cakrin, when all was said and done, was a strange old man. It was far better to have someone he knew and trusted in charge of this business.

“I’ll talk to Rudra Cakrin about it,” Drepung said.

“I thought you said he was a front man.”

“No no. A . . . a colleague. I need to consult with him, for sure. For one thing he would probably conduct the ceremony. He is the oracle. But that also means he will know what ceremonies I refer to. There are some precedents. Certain accidents, mistakes rectified . . . there are some things I can look into.”

Charlie nodded. “Good. You remember what I said about Anna welcoming you to NSF.”

“Yes.” Drepung grimaced. “Actually, it was the oracle who told us to take that office.”

“Come on, what, he said ‘Move to 4201 Wilson Boulevard?’ ”

“Not exactly.”

“No I guess not! Well, whatever. Just remember how Anna feels about it. It’s probably very much like your mom felt.”

Charlie was surprised to hear himself going for the jugular like that. Then he thought of Joe clutching at him, frightened and pitiful, and his mouth clenched. He wanted all this business cleared away. The fever would follow.

They watched the river roil by. White patches on black water.

“Look—it looks like Frank is trying to catch that kayaker’s attention.”

“It sure does.”

The woman was now resting, paddle flat across the kayak in front of her, gliding downstream. Frank was hurrying downstream to stay abreast of her, stumbling once or twice on the rocky bank, hands to his mouth to cup shouts out to her. He started waving his arms up and down. He came to a flatter patch and ran to get ahead of her. He semaphored with his arms, megaphoned with his hands, jumped up and down.

“He must know that person?”

“Or something. But she must be hearing him, don’t you think?”

“It seems like it. Seeing him too, for that matter. She must not want to be interrupted.”

“I guess.”

It was hard to see how she couldn’t be noticing him; which meant she must be ignoring him on purpose. She floated on, and he continued to chase her, scrambling over boulders now, shouting still.

She never turned her head. A big boulder blocked Frank’s way and he slipped, went to his knees, held out his arms; but now she was past him, and did not look back.

Finally his arms fell. Head bowed, shoulders slumped—the very figure of a man whose hopes have been dashed.

Charlie and Drepung looked at each other.

“Do you think that Frank is seeming kind of . . .”

“Yes.”

IX

LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK

F
rank dropped by the Quiblers’ on a Saturday morning to pick up Nick and go to the zoo. He got there early and stood in the living room while they finished their breakfast. Charlie, Anna, and Nick were all reading as they ate, and so Joe stared at the back of his cereal box with a look of fierce determination, as if to crack the code of this staring business by sheer force of will. Seeing this Frank’s heart went out to him, and he circled the table and crouched by him to chat.

Soon Nick went to get ready, but before they left he wanted to show Frank a new computer game. Frank stood behind him, doing his best to comprehend the action on the screen. “How come he exploded like that?”

“It takes like weird mutant bad scientist stuff.”

“I see. And whoah, how come that one blew up?”

“I’m attacking him with an invisible character.”

“Is he good?”

“Well, he’s hard to see.”

Charlie cackled at this. Nick glanced over and said, “Dad, quit drinking my hot chocolate.”

“I thought you were done with it. I only took three sips.”

“You took four sips.”

“Don’t keep Frank waiting around, go get ready.”

At the zoo they first attended a workshop devoted to learning how to knap rocks into blades and arrowheads. Frank had noticed this on the FONZ website and had of course been very interested, and Nick was up for anything. So they sat on the ground with a ranger of about twenty-five, who reminded Frank of Robin. This young man wandered around the group, crouching to show each cluster how to hit the cores with the breaker stones so that they would flake properly. With every good knap he yelled “Yeah!” or “Good one!”

It was clearly the same process that had created Frank’s Acheulian hand axe, although their modern results were less shapely, and of course the newly cracked stone looked raw compared to the patina that burnished the old axe’s broken surfaces. No matter—it was a joy to try it, satisfying in the same way that looking into a fire was. It was one of those things you knew how to do the first time you tried it.

Frank was happily knapping away a protrusion on the end of a core, enjoying the clacks and chinks and the smell of sparks and rock dust in sunlight, when he and Nick both smashed their hands at the same time. Nick’s chin trembled and Frank growled as he clutched his throbbing thumb. “Oh man. My nail is going to be purple, dang it! What about yours?”

“Forefinger,” Nick said. “Middle knuckle.”

“Big owee.”

“Yep. Ow, ow—
kun chok sum!
“

“
Kun chok sum
? Is that Khembali?”

“Yes, it’s a Tibetan curse.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Means, three jewels!”

“Three jewels?”

“Heavy eh? They have worse ones of course.”

“Kun chok sum!”

The ranger came over grinning. “That, gentlemen, is what we call the granite kiss. Anyone in need of a Band-Aid?”

Frank and Nick declined.

“You can see how old the expression ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’ must be. They’ve found knapped tools like these a million and a half years old.”

“I hope it doesn’t hurt that long,” Nick said.

After they were done they put their new stone tools in their daypacks and went over to look at the gibbons and siamangs.

All the feral primates had either died or been returned to the zoo. This morning Bert and May and their surviving kids were the family out in the triangular gibbon enclosure. They only let out one family at a time, to avoid fights. Frank and Nick joined the small crowd at the railing to observe. The people around them were mostly young parents with toddlers. “Mon-key! Mon-key!”

Bert and May were relaxing in the sun as they had so many times before, on a small platform just outside the tunnel to their inside room—a kind of porch, in effect, with a metal basket hanging over it where food was placed. Nothing in the sight of them suggested that they had spent much of the previous year running wild in Rock Creek Park. May was grooming Bert’s back, intent, absorbed, dextrous. Bert seemed zoned out. Never did they meet the gaze of their human observers. Bert shifted to get the back of his head under her fingers, and she immediately obliged, parting his hair and closely inspecting his scalp. Then something caused him to give her a light slap, and she caught his hand and tugged at it. She let go and climbed the fence to intercept one of their kids, and suddenly those two were playing tag. When they passed Bert he cuffed at them, so they turned around and gang-tackled him. When he had disentangled himself from the fray he swung up the fence to the south corner of the enclosure, where it was possible to reach through and pull leaves from a tree. He munched a leaf, fended off one of the passing kids with an expert backhand.

It seemed to Frank that they were restless. It wasn’t obvious; at first glance they appeared languid, because any time they were not moving they tended to melt into their positions, even if they were hanging from the fence. So they looked mellow—especially when sprawled on the ground, arm flung overhead, idly grooming partner or kid—a life of leisure!

But after watching for a while it became evident that every ten minutes they were doing something else. Racing around the fence, eating, grooming, rocking; eventually it became apparent that they never did anything for more than a few minutes at a time.

Now the younger son caught fire and raced around the top of the fence, then cast himself into space in a seemingly suicidal leap; but he crashed into the canvas loop that crossed the cage just above the tops of the ground shrubs, hitting it with both arms and thus breaking his fall sufficiently to avoid broken bones. Clearly it was a leap he had made hundreds of times before, after which it was his habit to run over and bushwhack his dad.

Wrestling on the grass. Did Bert remember wrestling his elder son on that same spot? Did the younger son remember his brother? Their faces, even as they tussled, were thoughtful and grave. They seemed lost in their thoughts. They looked like animals who had seen a lot. This may have just been an accident of physiognomy. The look of the species.

Some teenagers came by and hooted inexpertly, hoping to set the animals off. “They only do that at dawn,” Nick reminded Frank; despite that, they joined the youths’ effort. The gibbons did not. The teenagers looked a bit surprised at Frank’s expertise.
Oooooooooooop! Oop oop ooooop!

Now Bert and May rested on their porch in the sun. Bert sat looking at the empty food basket, one long-fingered thumbless hand idly grooming May’s stomach. She lay flat on her back, looking bored. From time to time she batted Bert’s hand. It looked like the stereotypical dynamic, male groping female who can’t be bothered. But when May got up she suddenly bent and shoved her butt at Bert’s face. He looked for a second, leaned in and licked her; pulled back; smacked his lips like a wine taster. No doubt he could tell exactly where she was in her cycle.

The humans above watched without comment. After a while Nick suggested checking out their tigers, and Frank agreed.

Walking down the path to the big cat island, the image of May grooming Bert stuck in Frank’s mind. White-cheeked gibbons were monogamous. Several primate species were, though far more were not. Bert and May had been a couple for over twenty years, more than half their lives; Bert was thirty-six, May thirty-two. They knew each other.

When a human couple first met, they presented a facade of themselves to the other, a performance of the part of themselves they thought made the best impression. If both fell in love, they entered into a space of mutual regard, affection, lust; they fell in love; it swept them off their feet, yes, so that they walked on air, yes.

But if the couple then moved in together, they quickly saw more than just the performance that up to that point was all they knew. At this point they either both stayed in love, or one did while one didn’t, or they both fell out of love. Because reciprocity was so integral to the feeling, mostly one could say that they either stayed in love or they fell out of it. In fact, Frank wondered, could it even be called love if it were one-sided, or was that just some kind of need, or a fear of being alone, so that the one “still in love” had actually fallen out of love also, into denial of one sort or another. Frank had done that himself. No, true love was a reciprocal thing; one-way love, if it existed at all, was some other emotion, like saintliness or generosity or devotion or goodness or pity or ostentation or virtue or need or fear. Reciprocal love was different from those. So when you fell in love with someone else’s presentation, it was a huge risk, because it was a matter of chance whether on getting to know one another you both would stay in love with the more various characters who now emerged from behind the mask.

Bert and May didn’t have that problem.

The swimming tigers were flaked out in their enclosure, lying like any other cats in the sun. Tigers were not monogamous. They were in effect solitaries, who went their own way and crossed paths only to mate. Moms kicked out their cubs after a couple of years, and all went off on their own.

These two, however, had been thrown together, as if by fate. Swept out to sea in the same flood, rescued by the same ship, kept in the same enclosures. Now the male rested his big head on the female’s back. He licked her fur from time to time, then plopped his chin on her spine again.

Maybe there was a different way of coming to love. Spend a lot of time with a fellow traveler; get to know them across a large range of behaviors; then have that knowledge ripen into love.

The swimming tigers looked content. At peace. No primate ever looked that peaceful. Nick and Frank went to get snow cones. Frank always got lime; Nick got a mix of root beer, cherry, and banana.

THE KHEMBALI HOUSE STAYED VERY BUSY. With a significant percentage of Khembalung’s population cycling through it, occupying every closet and stairwell while waiting for openings in other refugia being established, the place jumped with a sense of crammed life that to Frank often felt surreal. Sometimes it was so obvious that a whole town had moved into a single house, as in some reality TV show. Sometimes as he sat in the corner of the big kitchen, peeling potatoes or drying dishes, he would look at all the industrious faces, cheerful or harried as they might be, and think: This is almost entertaining. Other times the tumult would get to him and his train of thought would leave the room and return to the forest in his mind. It was dark in that particular parcellation, dark and quiet, no, not quiet—the sound of the wind in the trees was always there—but solitary. The leaves and the stars and the creek were peaceful company.

“People are so crazy,” he would say to Rudra Cakrin at the end of the night as he sprawled on his mattress.

“Ha ha.”

Some nights he stayed late at work, working on the list or talking on the phone to a contact Diane had in Moscow, a Dmitri, who worked in the Kremlin’s environmental resources ministry. Late at night in D.C. it was midday in Moscow, and Frank could call and try to find out more about the Russians’ carbon capture plans. Dmitri’s English was excellent. He claimed that no decisions had been made about interventions of any kind. They were very happy to see the North Atlantic project under way.

After these conversations Frank sometimes just slept there on his couch, as he had planned to back at the beginning. It was entirely comfortable, but Frank found he missed his conversations with Rudra Cakrin. There was no other part of the day that held as many surprises for him. Even talking to Diane or Dmitri wasn’t as surprising, and the two Ds were getting pretty surprising. Sometimes Frank found himself a little bit jealous; she and Dmitri were old friends, and Frank could hear Diane’s voice take on the quality it had when she was talking to someone close to her; also the tone of one great power speaking to another. Dmitri had carte blanche to experiment with one-sixth of the land surface of the Earth. That was power; there were bound to be surprises there.

Even so, Rudra was more surprising. One night Frank was lying on his groundpad in the light of the dimmed laptop, trying to tell Rudra about the impact the old man’s lecture at NSF had had on him. When he asked about the particular sentence that had acted on him like a sort of catalyst—”An excess of reason is itself a form of madness”—Rudra snorted.

“Milarepa say that because his guru beat him all the time, and always a good reason for it. So Milarepa never think much of reason. But that is an easy thing to notice. And hardly anyone ever reason anyway.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that.” Frank described to the old man what had happened to him subsequent to the lecture containing that remark, explaining what he could of his ideas about zen koans or paradigm busters, and how they caused actual physical changes in the brain, leading to new systems of parcellation that reorganized both unconscious thought and the way consciousness perceived the world. “Then on the way to the Quiblers I got stuck with a woman in an elevator, I’ll tell you about that some other time. . . .”