Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [110]
“Okay. I’ll leave something there for this Saturday, and you get it and leave something for Wednesday.”
“Okay. But if I can’t, check the next week. But I’ll try.” And with a peck to the top of his head she was off into the dark of Georgetown.
Frank sat there, feeling stunned. A little drunk. He didn’t know what to think. He was confused, and for a moment overwhelmed, feeling the indecision fall hard on him. When you feel love, elation, worry, fear, and puzzlement, all at once, and all at equally full volume, they seem to cancel each other out, creating a vacuum, or rather a plenum. He felt Carolined.
“Fuck,” he said half-aloud. It had been that way from the moment they met, actually; only now it was intensified, fully present in his mind, still felt in his body. Abruptly he finished his drink and took off into the dark. Over the creek’s footbridge, back to the spot where they had kissed.
One of the trees on the river side of their impromptu layby had the two big roots she had referred to, growing out in a fork and then plunging down into the rich loamy earth and reuniting, leaving a leaf-filled pocket. He tore one of the clear plastic credit card holders out of his wallet, took a receipt from his pocket and wrote on the back:
I LOVE YOU I’LL LOOK EVERY WEDNESDAY WRITE ME
Then he put it in the sleeve and buried it under leaves shoved into the hole. Topped it all with leaves and hoped she would find it, hoped she would use it and write him. It seemed like she would. They had kissed so passionately, right here on this very spot, no more than an hour or so before. Why now this edge of discord between them?
Well, that seemed pretty clear: her desire for him to disappear with her. Obviously she felt it was important, and that he might even be in danger if he didn’t join her. But he couldn’t join her.
That feeling was in itself interesting, now that he thought of it. Was that a sign of decisiveness, or just being balky? Had he had any choice? Maybe one would never go into hiding unless there were no other choice. This was probably one cause of Caroline’s irritation; she had to hide, while he didn’t. Although maybe he did and just didn’t know it.
Big sigh. He didn’t know. For a second he lost his train of thought and didn’t know anything. What had just happened? He looked down on the bed of leaves they had lain on. Caroline! he cried in his mind, and groaned aloud.
HE WAS SITTING WITH RUDRA at the little table under their window, both of them looking at laptops and tapping away, the room itself slightly swaying on a wind from the west. After the heat of the day, the cool fragrance coming off the river was a balm. Moonlight broke and squiggled whitely on the black sweep of the water. Frank was reading Thoreau and at one point he laughed and read aloud to Rudra:
“We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains on the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for three score years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them.”
Rudra nodded. “Henry likes the same things you do,” he observed.
“It’s true.”
“A treehouse is a good idea,” Rudra said, looking out the windows at the dark river.
“It is, isn’t it?”
Frank read on for a while, then: “Here, listen to this, he might as well be at the table with us:
“I live so much in my habitual thoughts that I forget there is any outside to the globe, and am surprised when I behold it as now—yonder hills and river in the moonlight, the monsters. Yet it is salutary to deal with the surface of things. What are these rivers and hills, these hieroglyphics which my eyes behold? There is something invigorating