Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [44]
“It’s called ‘always defect,’ ” Frank insisted.
“Okay, but then look at what that leads to.”
“All right.”
Clearly Anna was incensed at how unreasonable people were being. To her it was a matter of being rational, of being logical. “Why don’t they just do the math?” she demanded.
A rhetorical question, Frank judged. Though he wished he could answer it, rhetorically or not, in a way that did not depress him. His investigations into cognition studies were not exactly encouraging. Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape.
After this conversation, Frank recalled her saying “end of the winter” as if that were near, and he checked his desk calendar—the date for his ENT appointment was circled there, and not too far away—and suddenly he realized that in America, when it came to health care, the most important product of them all, they always operated in a shortage society.
In any case, he went to the doctor when the day came. Ear, nose, and throat—but what about brain? He read Walden in the waiting room, was ushered into an examination room to wait and read some more, then five minutes of questions and inspections, and the diagnosis was made: he needed to see another specialist. A neurologist, in fact, who would have to take a look at some scans, possibly CT, PET, SPECT, MRI; the brain guy would make the calls. The ENT guy would give him a referral, he said, and Frank would have to see where they could fit him in. Scans; the reading and analysis of the brain guy; then perhaps a re-examination by the ENT. How long would it all take? Try it and see. They hurried things up in scheduling when there were questions about the brain, but only so much could be done; there were a lot of other people out there with equally serious problems, or worse ones.
So, Frank thought as he went back to work in his office. You could buy DVD players for thirty dollars and flat-screen TVs for a hundred, also a million other consumer items that would help you to experience vicariously the lives that your work and wages did not give you time to live (that T-shirt seen on Connecticut Avenue, “Medieval Peasants Worked Less Than You Do”)—everything was cheap, in overproduction—except you lived in a permanent shortage of doctors, artificially maintained. Despite the high cost of medical insurance (if you could get it) you had to wait weeks or months on tests to find out how your body was sick or injured, when such events befell you. Even though it was possible to measure statistically how much health care a given population was going to need, and provide it accordingly.
But there was nothing for it but to think about other things, when he could; and when not, to bide his time and try to work, like everyone else.
It had been every kind of winter so far, warmer, drier, stormier, colder. Bad for agriculture, but good for conversation. In the first week of March, a cold front swept south and knocked them back into full winter lockdown, the river frozen, the city frozen, every Metro vent steaming frost, which then froze and fell to the ground as white dust. The whole city was frosted, and with all the steam curling out of the ground, looked as if it had been built atop a giant hot spring. Bad Washington. When the sun came out everything glittered whitely, then prismatically when the melting began, then went gray when low stratus clouds obscured the sun.
For Frank this was another ascent into what he thought of as high latitude or high altitude: a return to the high country one way or another, because weather was landscape, in that however the land lay underfoot,