Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [31]
The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spent almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that—even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parcelled out. There were:
1. the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;
2. the people you worked with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;
3. the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week;
4. then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, or eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full calendar according to Frank’s calculations so far, suggesting they were all living more hours a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety, except you yourself.
One could, therefore:
1. pursue a project in paleolithic living,
2. change the weather,
3. attempt to restructure your profession, and
4. be happy,
all at once, although not simultaneously, but moving from one thing to another, among differing populations; behaving as if a different person in each situation. It could be done, because there were no witnesses. No one saw enough to witness your life and put it all together.
Through the lowest leaves of his tree appeared the aluminum-runged nylon rope ladder. One of his climbing friends had called this kind of ice-climbing ladder a “Miss Piggy,” perhaps because the rungs resembled pig iron, perhaps because Miss Piggy had stood on just such a ladder for one of her arias in The Muppets’ Treasure Island. Frank grabbed one of the rungs, tugged to make sure all was secure above, and started to climb, still pursuing his train of thought. The parcellated life. Fully optimodal. No reason not to enjoy it; and suddenly he realized that he was enjoying it. It was like being a versatile actor in a repertory theater, shifting constantly from role to role, and all together they made up his life, and part of the life of his time.
Cheered by the thought, he ascended the upper portion of his Miss Piggy, swaying as little as possible among the branches. Then through the gap, up and onto his plywood floor.
He hand-turned the crank on the ladder’s spindle to bring the ladder up after him without wasting battery power. Once it was secured, and the lubber’s hole filled with a fitted piece of plywood, he could relax. He was home.
Against the trunk was his big duffel bag under the tarp, all held in place by bungee cords. From the duffel he pulled the rolled-up foam mattress, as thick and long as a bed. Then pillows, mosquito net, sleeping bag, sheet. On these warm nights he slept under the sheet and mosquito net, and only used his down bag as a blanket near dawn.
Lie down, stretch out, feel the weariness of the day bathe him. Slight sway of the tree: yes, he was up in a tree house.
The idea made him happy. His childhood fantasy had been the result of visits to the big concrete treehouse at Disneyland. He had been eight years old when he first saw it, and it had bowled him over: the elaborate waterwheel-powered bamboo plumbing system, the bannistered stairs spiraling up the trunk, the big living room with its salvaged harmonium, catwalks to the separate bedrooms on their branches, open windows on all four sides. . . .
His current aerie was a very modest version of that fantasy, of course. Just the basics: a ledge bivouac rather than the Swiss family mansion, and indeed his old camping gear was well-represented around him, augmented by some nifty car-camping extras, like the lantern and the foam mattress and the pillows from the apartment. Stuff scavenged from the wreckage of his life, as in any other Robinsonade.
The tree swayed and whooshed in the wind.