He cursed Marta viciously as he drove. Marine layer gusting in, lit by the city from underneath, then out over the sea darker, lit only by moonlight from above. Marta, angry at him: would he miss that when it was gone? A feeling was a relationship. Then again, now he was angry at her. There was something pressing on his brain, even more than the usual; a headache was coming on, the likes of which he had never felt before. A migraine, perhaps, and at the same time as a drug-induced hard-on that hurt. It was like priapism—maybe it was priapism! The side-effects warnings on the TV ads mentioned this ever so quickly, but it was a serious danger. Terrible permanent damage could result. Shit—he was going to have to go find an ER somewhere and confess all. Tell the truth that he hadn’t known he was taking it, and get laughed at as a liar.
He cursed again, drove up the long hill of Torrey Pines, past their new facility and UCSD. Park on La Jolla Farms Road and walk out onto the bluff in the dark, his stuff in a daypack.
He had spent some sexy nights out here, he thought as he throbbed. Oh well. Now he just wanted to be free of it. Just embrace the cliff and make love to Mother Earth. But it hurt and his head pounded and he was afraid. It felt as if an orgasm would blow out every little sac, or shoot his spine right out of him while his head exploded. Horror movie images—damn Marta anyway. What a horrible drug thus to ruin one of the best feelings of all. Some guys must be so desperate. But of course. Everyone desperate for love, so now you could buy it, of course, but it hurt. Would he have to give up and go to the ER and explain—have to feel the needles stuck in there to drain him?
Abruptly he got up and downclimbed over the lip of his little scallop, out onto the cliff. Now he was hanging there in space, and could slip and die at any moment. Not a good move really. Fear, real fear, stuck him like a stab in the ribs, and his blood rushed everywhere in him, hot and fast. Suddenly the sandstone was as if lit from within. His left foot was on a gritty hold, and slipping slightly. He grasped a shrub that had sent a branch over the lip, wondered if it would hold his weight. It was terrible climbing rock, gritty and weak, and suddenly he was angry as well as afraid. Sound of the surf cracking below—350 feet below. Hanging by a shrub on Black’s Cliffs. He set his feet and pulled smoothly back up onto the scallop, a desperately graceful little move.
And the blood had indeed evacuated his poor penis. Detumescence, a new pleasure, never before experienced as such. Blessed relief. Even his head felt a little better. And he had worked his will over a powerful drug, and over Marta too. Hopefully he had survived undamaged. Little sacs, all overfull; he was going to be sore, he could tell. It felt like last winter’s brush with penile frostbite.
Scared back to normality. Not a smart move. The margaritas might be implicated in that one. Leap before you look, sure—but not really.
He took a deep breath, feeling foolish in multiple ways. Well, no one knew the full extent of his folly. And he was back in his scallop. He could sit on his sleeping bag, breathe deeply, shake his head shuddering, like someone casting off a nightmare.
So much for Marta. She could not have cured him of his momentary lust for her any more effectively than if she had given him the exact antidote for it. Homeopathic poison; just her style. He recalled the last time he had taken mescaline, back in the days he had slept out here, throwing up and thinking it was stupid to poison oneself to get high. But that was what life with Marta had been. He liked her in some ways, he liked her energy and her wit, but there had always been so much he didn’t like about her. And any excess of her good qualities quickly became so obnoxious.
He wanted his Caroline. Somewhere out east she also was alone, and thinking of him. He knew it was true at least some of the time. How he wanted to
talk
to her! Cell phone to cell phone—surely they could both get one, on some account unknown to her ex? He needed to talk to her!
Like he could always talk to Diane.
Slowly the susurrus of surf calmed him, and then, as his body finally relaxed, it helped to make him sleepy. For a long time he just sat there. In D.C. it was three a.m. Diane and Caroline. His own personal D. C. He was jetlagged. San Diego—or really this campus, these very cliffs—this beautiful place…this was his home. The ocean made him happy. The ground here was good. Just to be here, to feel the air, to feel the thump of the breaking waves, to hear their perpetual grumble and hiss, grumble and hiss, crack grumble and hiss…To breathe it. Salt air fuzzy in the moonlight. The brilliant galaxy of light that was La Jolla, outlining its point. Ah, if only he knew what to do.
A
T FIRST PHIL CHASE
wanted to call his blog “The Fireside Chat,” but then someone pointed out to him that he was already doing those on talk radio, so he changed the name to “Cut to the Chase.” He wrote his entries late at night in bed before falling asleep, and hit send without even a spell check, so that his staff got some horrible jolts with their morning coffee, even though Phil had clearly stated right at the top of the home page that these were his private personal musings only, blogged to put the electorate in touch with his thinking as a citizen, and no reflection of formal policies of his administration. No impact whatsoever on anything at all—just the president’s blog.
CUT TO THE CHASE
Posted 11:53 PM:
We Americans don’t want to be in a state of denial about our relationship to the world and its problems. If we’re five percent of the world’s population and we’re burning one quarter of the carbon being burned every year, we need to know that, and we need to think about why it’s happening and what it means. It’s not a trivial thing and we can’t just deny it. It’s a kind of obesity.
There are different kinds of denial. One is sticking your head in the sand. You manage not to know anything. Like that public service ad where there’s a bunch of ostriches down on a big beach, and all the big ones have their heads in the sand, and some of the little ones do too, but a lot of the little ones are running around, and they see a giant wave is coming in and they start yelling down the holes to the big ones,
There’s a wave coming!
and one of the big ones pulls his head out and says
Don’t worry, just stick your head in like this,
and the little ones look at each other and figure that if that’s what their parents are doing it must be okay, so they stick their heads in the sand too—and in the last frame you see that all the holes in the sand are windows made of little TVs and computer screens. That kind of says it all. And there you are seeing it on TV.
But there are other kinds of denial that are worse yet. There’s a response that says I’ll never admit I’m wrong and if it comes to a choice between admitting I’m wrong or destroying the whole world, then bring it on. This is the Götterdämmerung, in which the doomed gods decide to tear down the world as they lose the big battle. The god-damning of the world. It’s a term sometimes used to describe what Hitler did in the last months of World War Two, after it was clear Germany was going to lose the war.
Of course people are offended by any comparison to the actions of Adolf Hitler. But consider how many species have died already, and how many more might die if we keep doing what we’re doing. It may not be genocide, but it is ugly. Species-cide. As if nothing else matters but us, and specifically the subset of us that agrees with everything we say. When you take a look at our own Rapture culture, these people pretending to expect the end of the world anytime now, you see that we have our own Götterdämmerung advocates, all very holy of course, as the world destroyers always are. And it’s an ugly thing. Countries can go crazy, we’ve seen it happen more than once. And empires always go crazy.
But right now we need to stay sane. We don’t want the United States of America to be hauled before the World Court on a charge of attempted Götterdämmerung. We can’t let that happen, because THIS IS AMERICA, land of the free and home of the brave—the country made of people from all the other countries—the grand experiment that all world history has so far been conducting! So if we blow it, if America blows it, then all world history might be judged a failure so far. We don’t want that. We don’t want to go from being the hope of the world to convicted in the World Court of attempted Götterdämmerung.
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B
ACK IN D.C. IT WAS STILL SO COLD
that the idea that he could have been surfing the day before struck Frank as ludicrous. Crossing the continent in March was like changing planets. It was a bigger world than they thought.
It was so many planets at once. The Hyperniño had left California, following the Pacific’s oceanic heat shift to the west, which signaled the onset of a La Niña, predicted to be devastating to Southeast Asia. Now all of California was fully in the drought that had begun in the northern half of the state several years before. The East Coast, meanwhile, was in a kind of cold drought, which included occasional dumps of snow that had the consistency of styrofoam. Like the snow in Antarctica, Charlie’s colleague Wade said in a phone call. Frank called Wade fairly often now, finding him to be the best contact person on the Antarctic situation. Every once in a while, at the end of a call, they would talk for a minute or two about personal matters, which was interesting, as they had never met. But somehow something had come up, perhaps Wade describing his plans for a coming week, and after that they both seemed to like talking to someone they had never met about these kinds of things. Wade too had a girlfriend whom he saw all too infrequently. He described himself as a desert rat, who endured the polar cold for the chance to see this woman.
At the embassy, only the older Khembalis were used to cold. The younger ones were tropical creatures, and walked around blue-lipped; those of Rudra’s generation never seemed to notice the cold at all. They left their arms bare in really frigid temperatures.
Rudra often was reading in bed when Frank came in, or looking at picture books. Then one day Qang brought him a laptop, and he chuckled as he tapped away at it, looking at photo collections of various sorts, including pornographic. Other times Frank found him humming to himself, or asleep with a book still swaying on his chest.
When he was up and about, he was slower than ever. When Frank and he went for walks, they always got the wheelchair out from under the stairs; it was as if this was the way they had always done it.
Frank said, “Listen to this: ‘If he had the earth for his pasture and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still. He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy or demon who possesses such power as that.’ ”
Rudra said, “Emerson?”
“Right.” They had begun a game in which Rudra tried to guess which of the two New Englanders Frank was reading from. He did pretty well at it.
“Good man. Means, go for a walk?”
It was too much like a dog begging to get out. “Sure.”
And so out they would go, Rudra bundled in down jacket and blankets against the cold he claimed not to notice, Frank in a suitable selection from his cold-weather gear. They had a route now that took them north to the Potomac under a line of tall oaks flanking Irving and Fillmore Streets. This brought them to the river at the mouth of Windy Run, which was often free of ice, and thus a temporary water hole frequented by deer, foxes, beaver, and muskrats. They looked for these regulars, and any unusual visiting animals, and then the wind would force them to turn their backs and head downstream for a bit, on a rough old asphalt sidewalk, after which they could angle up 24th Street, and thus back to the house. The walk took about an hour, and sometimes they would stop by the river for another hour. Once as they turned to go Frank saw a flash of dark flank, and had the impression it might have been some kind of antelope. It would have been the first time in Virginia he had seen a feral exotic, and as such worthy of calling in to Nancy for entry into the GIS. But he wasn’t sure, so he let it go.
The quiet neighborhood between Rock Creek Park and Connecticut Avenue was looking more withdrawn than ever. It had always been empty-seeming compared to most of D.C., but now three or four houses had burned and not been rebuilt, and others were still boarded up from the time of the great flood. At night these dark houses gave the whole place an eerie cast.
Some of the dark houses gleamed at the cracks or smoked from the chimneys, and if after a dusk hike in the ravine Frank was hungry, or wanted company, he would call up Spencer and see if he was in any of these places. Once when Spencer answered they established that he was inside the very house Frank was looking at.
In Frank went, uncertain at first. But he was a familiar face now, so without further ado he helped to hold a big pot over the fire, ate broiled steak, and ended up banging on the bottom of an empty trash can while Spencer percussed his chair and sang. Robert and Robin showed up, ate, sang duets to Robert on guitar, then pressed Spencer and Frank to go out and play a round of night golf.
It was full moon that night, and once they got going, Frank saw that they didn’t need to see to play their course. They had played it so many times that they knew every possible shot, so that when they threw they could feel in their bodies where the frisbee was going to land, could run to that spot and nine times out of ten pick it up. Although on that night they did lose one of Robert’s, and spent a few minutes looking for it before Spencer cried, as he always did in this situation, “LO AND BEHOLD,” and they were off again.
Socks and shoes got wet with melted snow. No snowshoes tonight, and so he leaped through drifts and abandoned his feet to their soggy fate. On a climbing expedition it would have meant disaster. But in the city it was okay. There was even a certain pleasure in throwing caution to the wind and crashing through great piles of snow, snow which ranged from powder to concrete.
Then in one leap he hooked a foot and crashed down onto a deer’s layby, panicking the creature, who scrambled under him. Frank tried to leap away too, slipped and fell back on the doe; for a second he felt under him the warm quivering flank of the animal, like a woman trying to shrug off a fur coat. His shout of surprise seemed to catapult them both out of the hole in different directions, and the guys laughed at him. But as he ran on he could still feel in his body that sudden intimacy, the kinetic jolt: a sudden collision with a woman of another species!