Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [144]
“That way, if you kept it a clean site, they wouldn’t know where you were. When you were away from your van, anyway.”
“I’d have to leave a lot of stuff in the van.”
“They would think you were living in it. You’d have to wand yourself when you came up here, and see if you’d picked anything up. If you wanted to be serious about it, you’d get rid of the van and cell phone, and only use public stuff, and buy everything with cash. We call it devolving.”
Frank laughed. “I’ve been trying to do that anyway.”
“I can see that. But you’d have to do it in this other area.”
He nodded. He put his face into the hair on the top of her head. Tight curls, a kind of lemon and cypress shampoo; he felt her body on his, and another jolt of desire ran through him. She was helping him. She was strong, bold, interested. She liked him, she wanted him. After four years she would probably want anybody, but now it was him.
“What about you?” he said.
She shrugged.
“So does your, does he know that you know he’s spying on you?”
“He must.” Her grimace as underlit by Frank’s floor lamp gave her the look of one of the Khembali demon masks: fear, despair, anger. Seeing it Frank felt a wave of deep dislike for her husband pour through him. He wanted to get rid of him. Remove him like a chip. Protect her, make her happy—
“—but we don’t talk about it,” she was saying.
“That sounds bad.”
“It is bad. I need to get out of there. But there are some complications having to do with his new job. Some things I need to do first.” She fell silent, and her body, though still on top of his, was not melted into him as before. This was another new sensation, her otherness, naked and on top of him. He shivered and pulled the down bag back over their heads.
“So you got your pay-phone numbers.”
“Yes.” He had remembered despite the injury.
“And when will we talk?”
“Nine P.M. every Friday?”
“Sure. And if we have to miss for some reason, the next week for sure, and if we miss again, I’ll call your cell phone.”
“Okay. Good.”
Her warmth coursed into him. Up in the tree they hugged each other. This moment of the storm.
“Oh good,” he said.
LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK.
Now winter was here in earnest. A series of brutal storms fell on the city, like the ones that had struck London only drier, all of them windy and cold, not very much snow, but that only made them seem colder. Kenzo said there hadn’t been a winter like this since the Younger Dryas; it was worse than the Little Ice Age of the fourteenth century, a true North Atlantic stall event. Average temperatures in eastern North America and western Europe down by a full thirty degrees Fahrenheit.
Frank spent as much time as he could out in these storms. He loved being in them. He loved the way he felt after the night with Caroline. The walking-on-air sensation returned, obviously a specific body awareness in response to certain emotional states, giving birth to the cliché. Lightness of being.
Then also the intense winter was like moving into ever higher altitudes, or latitudes. He was in the wilderness and he was in love, and the combination was a kind of ecstatic state, a new realm of joy—
“the joy which will not let me sit in my chair, which brings me bolt upright to my feet, and sends me striding around my room, like a tiger in his cage—and I cannot have composure and concentration enough even to set down in English words the thought which thrills me, what if I never write a book or a line?—for a moment, the eyes of my eyes were opened.”
Emersonfortheday indeed. A man who knew how joy could loft you. No wonder they named schools after him! You could learn a lot just by reading him alone.
He snowshoed the park regularly, but also began to range more broadly in the city, taking long walks on each side of the park. This was where the homeless guys were finding refuge, and where the fregans and ferals made their homes. Frank decided that whenever he did