Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [155]
Frank could not be more set; he was probably the best-dressed man in the city. He was the Alpine man, come back to life! And his goal, Johnny Appletentlike, was to get everybody else living out-of-doors into gear that was at least adequate. Into shelters at night if the cold was too much. It was no easy task, because it called not only for acquisition of gear that was disappearing fast from all the thrift shops (though people didn’t recognize wool, apparently), but the money to fund it. He used a grant from the zoo’s feral fund, among other things, considering that with that name it was not even a case of reprogrammed funds. But the distribution of the gear could be tricky. No one liked gratitude, but many people were cold enough to take what he gave them. Cotton and cardboard were no longer hacking it. The stubborn ones were likely to die. The newspapers reported that a few hundred already had. Frank could scarcely believe some of the stories in the Post about the dumb things people had done and were still doing. They could be six inches from safety and not recognize it. It was as John Muir had said of the Donner Party; a perfectly fine winter base camp, botched by ineptitude. But they didn’t know. It was a technique, and if you didn’t have it you died. It wasn’t rocket science but it was mandatory.
Frank had to be careful not to get careless himself. He stayed out all day every day, and part of him was beginning to think he had it wired, so that he spent longer sessions out. Sometimes he discovered he was so ravenous or thirsty that he was going to keel over; he blew into the coffee shops shivering hard, only to discover white patches on his chin, and fiendishly pinpricking fingers and ears. God knew what was happening to his poor nose. Emergency infusions of hot chocolate, then, blowing across the top and burning his mouth to gulp some down, burning his esophagus, feeling his insides burning while his extremities fizzed with cold. Hot chocolate was the perfect start on a return to proper heat and energy. Cinnamon rolls too; he was coming to believe that cinnamon was a powerful stimulant and that it also allowed him to see better in the black-and-white of his dawn and dusk patrols. Shifting dapple under cloudy moonlight, it didn’t matter to him now, he saw the structure of Washington, D.C., and Rock Creek Park underneath all that chiaroscuro, high on the magic spice.
One night he found the bros back in the park, around a very hospitable bonfire. Just outside the light the body of a deer lay partly skinned, steaks hacked out of its flank.
“—so fucking cold it made me stupid.”
“Like that’s what did it.”
“—I couldn’t even talk for a couple days. Like my tongue was froze. Then I could talk, but I only knew like ten words.”
“That happened to me,” Fedpage put in. “I started talking in old English, and then German. You know, ’Esh var kalt.’ The Germans really know how to say it. And then it was just grunts and moans for a while. ‘Fur esh var kallllt.’ ”
“You’re funny Fedpage. You were wasted in Vietnam.”
“I was indeed wasted in Vietnam.”
Fluctuating radiant pulses of heat washed over their faces.
Frank sat by the fire and watched it burn. “So you guys really were in Vietnam.”
“Of course.”
“You must be pretty old then.”
“We are pretty old then! Fuck you. How the fuck old are you?”
“Forty-three.”