“You’ve got a syllabus page in your notebook.”
“Yeah but tonight was added on, it’s only online.”
“You can do the next thing on the syllabus.”
“Ah Mom!”
“Don’t Ah Mom me! I’m trying to find the candles here, Charlie can you help get them out?”
“Sure. Wow, these feel funny.”
“I hope they aren’t all—yep, they are. Melted like the Wicked Witch of the West. Dang it. Why—”
“Did you find matches there too?”
Charlie shuffled into the dark kitchen and gave her a hug from the side. Joe suddenly limpeted onto her legs, moaning “Momma Momma Momma.”
“Hi guys,” she said resignedly. “Help and get some candles lit. Some of these should work. Come on you guys, we’re in the dark here.”
They got some misshapen candles lit and placed them in the living room and the kitchen, and on the dining room table in between. Anna cooked spaghetti on their Coleman stove, heating a jar of sauce, and Charlie got a fire going in the fireplace. They settled in to eat. Nick ran down the batteries in his Gameboy, then read by the light of two candles. Charlie typed on his laptop and Anna did the same. The laptop screens were like directional lanterns, adding blue light to the candles’ yellow light. They ate yogurt and ice cream for dessert. Anna tried to restrict how many times they opened the refrigerator door, but it didn’t really work. She had the thermometers set up in the two boxes, and took a reading sometimes when people wanted to get food.
It was quiet outside, compared to the normal city hum. It had been a while since the last blackout, and it was comforting to fall into the routine. A sign that winter had come. Although there had been a spate of blackouts in the hottest part of the summer as well. Sirens in the distance. The clouds out the window were dark—no moon, apparently, and no city light coming from below. It would have been interesting to know how extensive the blackout was, and what had caused it, and how long it was expected to last. “Should we turn on the radio?”
“No.”
They would wait on the generator too. Crank it if they had to.
After a while they got out the Apples to Apples game, and played a few rounds. Joe joined them in the game while continuing to draw with Anna on a big sheet of poster paper they had spread on the floor. He had recently taken to drawing in a big way, mostly sketching big stick figures of various creatures, often red creatures with a kind of Precambrian look, flying over stick forests of blue or green. Now he continued to add lines, and scribbled in patches, while insisting on being part of the game, so that they dealt him a hand, and Anna helped him to read what his cards said, whispering in his ear to his evident delight. The game—junior level, for Joe’s sake—dealt people hands of cards on which were printed various nouns, and then an adjective card was turned up by the player whose turn it was, and the rest provided nouns face down, and that player shuffled them and read them aloud, modified by the common adjective, and picked which combination he or she liked the best. The adjective now was SLIMY; the nouns read aloud by Nick were SLIMY ANTS, SLIMY MARSHMALLOWS, and SLIMY PIPPI LONGSTOCKING. You picked nouns tailored to that particular judge, or else just gave up and tried to be funny. It was a good game, and although Joe was somewhat out of his depth and would not admit it, his choice of nouns often had a Dada quality that seemed inspired, and he won about as frequently as any of them.
On this night he was into it. He got a hand he didn’t like for some reason, and threw the cards down and said “These are bad! I poop on these cards!”
“Joe.”
“I gotta win!”
“It doesn’t matter who wins,” Charlie said as always.
“Why do we keep the adjectives we win then?” Nick would always ask.
“We do that because they describe us so well when we read them aloud at the end,” Charlie would always respond. This was his addition to the game, as for instance, at the end of this one: “I’m noisy, soft, happy, strange, slimy, and old!” he read. “Pretty accurate, as usual.”
Nick said “I’m weird, wonderful, useful, skinny, slippery, and sloppy.”
Anna was good, hard, spooky, sharp, and important. Ever since she had won the cards for dirty and fat she had been unenthusiastic about Charlie’s addition to the game.
Joe was great, short, smooth, fancy, jolly, strong, creepy, and loud. He had won the most.
“What does it mean when an illiterate person wins a game that’s written down?” Charlie wondered.
“Be nice,” Anna said.
After that they sat and watched the fire. The rumble of other people’s generators sounded almost like traffic on Wisconsin. The chill air outside the front door smelled to Charlie of two-stroke engines, and fires in fireplaces. The smell of last winter. Sirens still wafted in from the city distance.
Inside they huddled by the fire. It had been well below freezing for the last week, probably the cause of the blackout, and it was going to be very cold upstairs, with the wind rattling the windows. And in the morning the fire would be out. After some discussion they decided to sleep in the living room again. The couches would do fine for Nick and Joe, and Anna and Charlie hauled the tigers’ mattress up the stairs from the cellar. All this was a ritual now; sometimes they did it without the excuse of a blackout.
Faces ruddy in the flickering firelight. It reminded Charlie of camping out, although they never got to have fires in the Sierra anymore. Anna read “Good-night Moon” to Joe yet one more time (on nights like this he demanded old favorites), while Nick and Charlie read books silently to themselves. This put all four of them out pretty quickly.
The next morning they saw that a little snow had fallen. They were just settling in for the day, Charlie planning to roast some green firewood over the flames of drier wood, when the power came back on with its characteristic click and hum. It had been eleven hours. On the news they found out that electricity for essential services had been provided to Baltimore by the nuclear aircraft carrier USS
Theodore Roosevelt,
and that this had helped the power company to get back online faster.
The day was already disarranged, so Charlie took Nick to school, then returned home, where he and Anna and Joe tried to settle in. None of them seemed to be enjoying this situation, Anna and Charlie trying to work in quick shifts while the other occupied Joe, who was curious to know why he wasn’t at daycare; and after a couple hours’ struggle, Charlie suggested he take Joe out for a walk while Anna continued to work.
It was a crisp, clear day. According to the little backpacking thermometer hanging from the bottom of the baby backpack (Anna’s idea, more data) the temperature outside was very near zero. It would have been perfect conditions for the baby backpack, because with Joe on his back they kept each other warm. But Joe refused to get in it. “I wanna walk,” he said. “I’m too big for that now, Dad.”
This was not literally true. “Well, but we could keep each other warm,” he said.
“No.”
“Okay then.”
It occurred to Charlie that it had been quite a while since Joe had been willing to get in the thing and take a ride. And it was looking a little small. Possibly Joe had gotten into it for the last time, and the final usage of it had passed without Charlie noticing. With a pang Charlie put it into the depths of the vestibule closet. How he had loved carrying Nick and then Joe around like that. He had done a lot of backpacking in his life, but no load on his back had ever felt so good to him as his boys. Instead of weighing him down they had lifted him up. Now that was over.
Oh well. They set out together on a walk through the hilly neighborhoods east of Wisconsin Avenue.
O
N A BRIGHT CHILL SATURDAY MORNING
not long after that, Charlie once again joined Drepung and Frank down on the Potomac, this time at a put-in just downstream from Great Falls, on the Maryland side.
Mornings on the river were filled with a blue glassy light unusual elsewhere in the city at that time of year. The deciduous trees were bare, the evergreens dusted with snow.
Frank generally paddled ahead of the other two, silent as he so often was, absorbed in the scene. Charlie and Drepung followed at a distance, talking over the events of the week and sharing their news.
“Did Frank tell you that he visited the original Shambhala?” Drepung asked Charlie.
“No, what do you mean?”
Drepung explained.
“It seems a funny place for Shambhala to have begun,” Charlie said. “Out there in the middle of nowhere.”
“Yes, doesn’t it? But in the eighth century it was different, and, well, howsoever it came about, that’s where it happened.”
“But eventually it ended up in Khembalung.”
“Yes. That is simply the Sherpa word for Shambhala. It came into use when the city was in a hidden valley east of Everest.”
“But then the Chinese came.”
“Yes. Then the inhabitants moved to the island.”
“Now under the Bay of Bengal.”
“Yes.”
“And so what becomes of Khembalung now?”
Drepung smiled and waggled his paddles. “Always here and now, right? Or at the farm in Maryland, in any case.”
“Okay, if you say so. And what about this original site, is it going to be drowned too, you said? Won’t that make three for three?”
“No, Frank said it will be close to the shore of the new lake, but they are going to build a dike that will keep it dry.”
“Another dike?”
Drepung laughed. “Yes, it does sound a bit too familiar, but I’ve looked at the maps and heard the plans, and it sounds as if the dike will be rather huge, and more than enough to serve the purpose.”
“Why are the Chinese doing this?”
“I think they see it as a tourist attraction, basically. They are going to excavate the ancient city thoroughly, and clean it up for visitors, and call it Shangri-La, and hope that many tourists will come to see it. Then also, maybe go boating or swimming when the sea is filled.”
“Amazing.”
“Yes, isn’t it? But a good thing too. Shambhala is the Buddhist idea of utopia. So, the more this idea is alive in the world, the more people will think about why they are not living in some version of such a place. It stands for a different way of life.”
“Yes.”
“Also, in the political sense, it seems to me that it’s a little bit of a Chinese concession to the Dalai Lama. It’s part of their campaign to reconcile with the Dalai Lama.”
Charlie was surprised. “You think there is such a campaign?”
“Yes, I think they want it to happen. Even if it is only to serve their own purposes, they seem to be serious about it.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that. Are you sure?”
Drepung nodded. “I’ve been made aware of informal talks with the Chinese.”
For a while they paddled hard to catch up with Frank, who was crossing to the Virginia side to look into the gap between Arlington and Theodore Roosevelt Island. Charlie watched Drepung paddle ahead of him, looking smooth and effortless.
“Drepung? Hey, can you tell me what’s going on with Joe and what we talked about?”
“Oh yes. I meant to tell you. Sucandra says that he and Qang can serve as the voice of Milarepa. Qang has done a divination to locate the spirit we exiled from Joe, and she says it is ready to come back. It was not happy to be expelled.”
Charlie laughed at that; it sounded like Joe. What if his spirit came back even angrier than before? But he forged on: “Qang…?”
“Yes, she is the servant of Tara, and has taken on much of the work of Rudra Cakrin, now that he is gone on.”
“And so—do you know when this can happen?”
“Yes.” Drepung glanced over at him. “We are having the ceremony that marks the recognition of the Maryland farm as the current manifestation of Shambhala, next Saturday.”
“Oh yeah, we got your invitation in the mail, thanks. I thought it said it was a housewarming.”
“Same thing. So, if you could come early, in the morning, we could have these private ceremonies. Then the afternoon could be devoted to celebrating all these things.”
“Okay,” Charlie said, swallowing hard. “Let’s do it.”
“You are sure?”
“Yes. I want Joe back. The original Joe.”
“Of course. Original mind! We all want that.” Drepung smiled cheerfully and called, “Hey Frank!” And dug his paddle tips in, to catch Frank before he disappeared around the tip of Roosevelt Island.
So that Saturday the Quiblers dressed up again, which was unusual enough to put them all in a fun mood, as if they were preparing for a costume party, or even Halloween: the boys and Charlie in shirts with collars, Anna in a dress: amazing!
Charlie drove them out the Canal Road to the Khembali farm, concocting the need for some meeting with Drepung to get them out there early. It was not far from the truth, and Anna did not question it.
So they arrived around ten, to find the farm compound decorated with great swatches of cloth dyed in the vivid Tibetan hues, draped over and between all the buildings, and weaving together on tall poles to form a big awning or tent on the lawn sloping down to the riverside.
Joe said, “Momma! Dad! It’s a color house! It’s a sky fort! Look!” He took off in the direction of the tent.
“Good!” Charlie said. “Be careful!”
“Will you go with him and watch?” Anna asked. “I want to see what Sucandra and Qang did with the kitchen remodel.”
“Sure, go check it out. I think I see them down in the tent right now, actually. But I’ll tell them that you’re checking it out and they’ll be on up I’m sure.”
“Thanks.”
Off she went inside. Charlie stood by Nick, who was looking at the party preparations, still ongoing. Nick said, “I wish Frank still lived here.”
“Me too. But I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”
“Do you think I can go up in the treehouse anyway?”
“Sure, sure. No one will mind. Go check it out. Don’t fall out.”
“Dad, please.”
“Well. Be careful.”
Off went Nick. It was all working out very well.
Charlie walked down to the big suspended awning, his heart pounding with trepidation.
Joe was standing in the middle of a circle of elderly Khembalis, looking around curiously. Sucandra was the youngest one there; Qang was chanting, her voice lower than most men’s. Joe nodded as if keeping time to her chant. White smoke billowed out of giant censers and bowls set around a low candle-covered table, on which stood a big statue of the Adamantine Buddha, the stern one with his hand outstretched like a traffic cop.