Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [180]
The lengthening days got fuller, impossible though that seemed. In the mornings Frank went to Optimodal, then to work; ran with the lunch runners when he could get away, then back to work; in the evenings over to the park for a frisbee run, passing the bros and catching a brief burst of their rambunctious assholery; then to a restaurant, often an impulse stop; and back to the house, to help where he could, usually the final cleanup in the kitchen. By the time he went out to the shed and Rudra, he was almost asleep.
Rudra was usually sitting up in bed, back against the headboard. Some-times he seemed to be daydreaming, others observant, even if only looking at the candle. He seemed attentive to the quality of Frank’s silences. Some-times he watched Frank without actually listening to him. Frank found that unnerving—although sometimes, when he quit talking and sat on his bed, reading or tapping away at his laptop, he became aware of a feeling that seemed in the room rather than in himself, of peacefulness and calm. It emanated from the old man. Rudra would watch him, or space out, perhaps humming to himself, perhaps emit a few bass notes with their head tones buzzing in a harmonic fifth. Meditation, Rudra said once when asked about them. What might meditation be said to be doing? Could one disengage awareness, or rather the active train of consciousness, always spinning out its string of sentences? Leaving only awareness? Without falling asleep? And what then was the mind doing? Was the deep thinking in the unconscious actually continuing to cogitate in its own hidden way, or did it too calm? Memories, dreams, reflections? Was there someone in there below the radar, walking the halls of the parcellated mind and choosing which room to enter, going in and considering the contents of that parcellation, and its relation to all the rest?
God he hoped so. It was either that or else he was zoning through his days in a haze of indecision. It could be that too.
______
He was almost asleep one night when his cell phone beeped, and he roused to answer it, knowing it was her.
“Frank it’s me.”
“Hi.” His heart was pounding. The sound of her voice had the effect of cardiac paddles slapped to his chest. The sensation was actually kind of frightening.
“Can you meet?”
“Yeah sure.”
“I know you’re in Arlington now. How about the Lincoln Memorial, in an hour?”
“Sure.”
“Not on the front steps. Around the back, between it and the river.”
“Isn’t that still fenced off?”
“South of that, then. South of the bridge then, on the new levee path.”
“Okay.”
“Okay see you.”
Rudra turned out to have been sitting up in the gloom. Now he was looking at Frank as if he’d understood every word, as why not; it had not been a complicated conversation.
Frank said, “I’m going out.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be back later.”
“Back later.” Then, as Frank was leaving: “Good luck!”
The banks of the Potomac between the Watergate and the Tidal Basin had been rebuilt with a broad levee just in from the river, topped by a path running under a double row of cherry trees. The Corps of Engineers had displayed their usual bravura style, and the new cherry trees were enormous. Under them at night Frank felt dwarfed, and the entire scene took on a kind of pharaonic monumentalism, as if he had been transported to some vast religious site on the banks of the Nile.
He stopped to look over the water to Theodore Roosevelt Island, where during the great flood he had seen Caroline in a boat, motoring upstream. That vision stood like a watermark in his mind, overlaying all his memories of the inundated city. He had never remembered to ask her what she had been doing that afternoon. She had stood alone at the wheel, looking straight ahead. Sometimes life became so dreamlike,