Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [168]
In this context the campaign for the presidential election coming up in the fall looked more trivial than ever. Phil Chase wrapped up the Democratic nomination, the president’s team upped the firepower of their attacks on him; the SSEEP virtual candidate caused trouble for everybody who came in contact with it. Frank couldn’t be bothered, and it seemed there were others like him out there. The long winter came first in the news and in people’s thoughts.
HALFWAY THROUGH APRIL THE INCREASING LENGTH of the days became impossible to miss. Spring was here, snow or not. Daylight savings time came, and even though the mornings were darker at first, that did not last long. By the first of May there was so much more light that there simply had to be more heat; and then one day without warning it hit eighty degrees, and everyone and everything sweltered. The whole world steamed, thawed branches drooped and hung, thawed pipes leaked, wires shorted, mold grew. It was like a permafrost melt in the tundra, with pingos and polygonal cracking and fields of new mud, and the air stifling. Mosquitoes came back, and everyone began to wonder if the hard winter had really been that bad after all.
When Frank visited Rock Creek he found Cutter on Connecticut again, using his old orange cones and orange tape to clear space around a tree canted at a forty-five-degree angle.
“How’s it going?”
“Pretty good! Spring has sprung!”
“Did the trees live?”
“Most of them yeah. Lot of dead branches. It’ll make for a busy summer. I swear the forest gonna take over this city.”
“I bet. Can I join you sometime?”
“Sure you can. Do you own a chainsaw?”
“No, can’t say I do.”
“That’s all right. There’s other help you can do.”
“I can always drag wood away.”
“Exactly.”
“So where do you take the wood if you’re doing something like this on your own?”
“Oh all kinds of places. I take it to a friend’s and we cut it up for firewood.”
“And that’s okay?”
“Oh sure. There’s an awful lot of trees need trimming. Lot of it being done by freelancers. The city need help, and the wood can be the pay.”
“It sounds like it works pretty well.”
“Well . . .” Cutter laughed.
“Hey, did you ever find out anything more about Chessman?”
“No, not really. I asked Byron but he didn’t know. He said he thought maybe he moved. There was a chess tournament up in New York he said Chessman talked about.”
“He said something about playing in it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Byron know his name?”
“He said he thought his name was Clifford.”
All the branches sprouted green buds. Tiny buds of a vivid light green, a color Frank had never seen before, a color that glowed on cloudy days, and sparked in his peripheral vision like fireflies. Green buds on a wet black bough, life coming back to the forest. It could not have been more beautiful. No moment in the Mediterranean climate could ever match this moment of impossible green.
He started going over to the park again, while at the same time he felt less anxious about living at the embassy house.
And yet he never returned to feeling quite himself. His face was still numb, inside his nose and right below it, and behind it. When he was shaving he saw that the numb part of his upper lip looked inert, and thus to himself he seemed deformed. He could not smile properly. He didn’t know how he felt about that. He supposed that the effect for others was slight, and that if noticed at all people did not talk about it, out of politeness.
The bros did not worry about that kind of thing. “Hey Jimmy! Jimmy Durante! How’s it hanging, did your dick survive its frostbite? That scared ya didn’t