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She twisted into him, kissed him again. “Hmmm,” she said after a while. “I’ve gotta go. . . .”

“That’s okay.”

“Sorry.”

“I understand. You’ll call?”

“Yes. When I can. Get those pay phone numbers ready.”

“I will.”

One last kiss and she was off into the night.

OOOP OOP!

Now Frank went fully optimodal. For a few days he even experienced the “walking on air” phenomenon, which was surely a physiological effect caused by an incomplete integration of happiness into sense data. Life in his tree, in the winter forest, at the gym, at work, in the restaurants he frequented, out in the brief hour of pale winter evening sun, running or throwing the disks or stalking animals—every day parcellated but full, every night a forest adventure, always alive, always generous. Ooop!

How big the world became in a wind. Everything expanded, inside and out. Hike in the dreamlike black forest, huge and blustery. Evening sky over the black branches, violet in the east shading to aquamarine in the west, all luminous, a Maxfield Parrish sky, only now it was obvious that Parrish had never exaggerated at all, but only done his best to suggest a reality that was so much more vivid and intense than any art.

One evening he tromped into 21 not long after sunset and found only Zeno and Redbeard and Fedpage and a couple more. “Where is everybody?”

“Over on Connecticut.”

“Seeking the heat, man.”

“What about Chessman, where’s he?”

Shrugs all around.

“Haven’t seen him for a while.”

“I bet he found a place to stay for the winter. He’s smart.”

“Come and go, Doctor Checkmate, come and go.”

Frank couldn’t read their attitude. He wondered if the chess hustlers at Dupont Circle might know where Chessman was, and resolved to visit and see. There was nothing more to be learned here.

Snow began to fall, small flakes ticking down. After the first heavy snowfall there had been little more of it; and it was usually this kind of frozen frost, swirling on the wind. The bros noted it gloomily, then wandered off. They had actually built the little shelters Zeno had proposed, Frank saw, in the dip they now called Sleepy Hollow, just to the west of the site. Some of them were already tucked into their low shelters, staring out red-eyed at the fire and the snowflakes. Cardboard, trashbags, branches, sheets of plywood, drop cloths, two-by-fours, cinder blocks: under that, dirty nylon or even cotton sleeping bags, toeing into snowbanks. You needed a groundpad under a sleeping bag for it to work.

Frank found himself annoyed. Living like rats when they didn’t have to; it was incompetent. Even if it was all they could find to build with.

It was hard to judge what was happening with them. One time Frank was running with the frisbee guys, completely absorbed in it, when they came into 21 and there was a quartet of young black men, wearing multiple cotton hooded sweatshirts, hands deep in their pockets. Spencer pulled up sharply and turned to the tables. “Hey how’s it going?”

“Oh good!” Zeno said sarcastically. “Real good! These brothers are wondering if we have any drugs to sell.”

“You guys?” Spencer laughed, and Robert and Robin echoed him as they flanked him on both sides, their golf disks held before them like Oddjob’s hat. Frank was just comprehending the situation when the young men joined the laughter, smiles flashing in the gloom, and headed down Ross without a farewell.

“Catch you guys,” Spencer said as he moved on to the next tee.

“Yeah, catch you,” Zeno growled. “Fucking drop by any time.”

At work that week, a group from NOAA came over to share their analysis of the Gulf Stream stall. They had done the calculations and modeling necessary to say something quantitative about the idea of restarting the far north downwelling, and Diane had asked General Wracke and several members of the Science Board to attend. The NOAA PI ran them through a quick recap of the problem: fresh-water cap introduced onto the surface of the far north Atlantic, reducing salinity and raising the water