Living outdoors the seasons were huge. Talk about abrupt climate change—housebound people had no idea. Shorter days, cooler air, dimmer light slanting through the trees at a lower angle: you might as well be on a different planet.
It was one of the ironies of their time that global warming was about to freeze Europe and North America, particularly on the eastern seaboard. Kenzo predicted weeks of severe, record-shattering lows: “You’re not going to believe it,” he kept saying, although it was already beginning in Europe. “The winter high will park over Greenland and force the jet stream to polar vortex straight at us from Hudson Bay.”
“I believe it,” Frank replied. Although, in another irony, the weather at that moment was rather glorious. The days were warm, while the cold between 2 A.M. and sunrise was bracing. Only a few weeks past the worst of their Congolese summer, there was frost on the leaves at dawn.
For Frank these chill nights meant the deployment of his mountain gear, always a pleasure to him. He basked in that special warmth that hominids have enjoyed ever since they started wearing the furs of other animals. Clothes made the man, literally, therefore also one of the first instances of the technological sublime, which was to stay warm in the cold.
Waking up in his treehouse, Frank would wrap his sleeping bag around him like a cape and sit on the plywood edge, arms over the railing, swinging his heels in space, looking at the wall of trees across the gorge. The leaves were beginning to turn, invading the green canopy with splashes of yellow and orange and red. As a Californian Frank had seldom seen it, and had never imagined it properly. He had not understood that the colors would be all mixed together, forming a field of mixed color, like a box of Trix spilled over a lawn, spelling in its gorgeous alien alphabet the end of summer, the passing of time, the omnipresence of mortality. To all who took heed it was an awesome and melancholy sight.
He let down Miss Piggy, descended into this new world, walked absorbed in the new colors, the mushroomy smells, the clattering susurrus of leaves in the wind. The next hard frost would knock most of these leaves down, and then his jungle treehouse would be exposed to the gaze of those below. Lances of sunlight already reached many parts of the forest floor. The park was still officially closed, but Frank saw more and more people, not just the homeless but also ordinary citizens, the people who had used the park before the flood as a place to run or walk or bike or ride. Luckily the creekside roads and trails were irreparable, and few would venture past the giant beaver dam, which had started like a beaver dam and now really was one. You had to bushwhack to get around it. Still, the treehouse would be exposed for those who came up this far.
That was a problem for another day. Now Frank walked north on a deer’s trail, observing how the changed colors of the leaves altered the sense of space in the forest, how there seemed to be an increase in sheer spaciousness. When he ran with the frisbee guys the leaves functioned as referent points, and he seemed to be engaging a new GPS system that locked him more than ever into the here-and-now. He saw just where he was, moment to moment, and ran without awareness of the ground, free to look about. Joy to be out on days so fresh and sunny, so dappled and yellow; immersion in the very image and symbol of change; very soon there would come an end to his tenuously established summer routines, he would have to find new ones. He could do that; he was even in a way looking forward to it. But what about the gibbons? They were subtropical creatures, as were many of the other ferals. In the zoo they would have been kept inside heated enclosures when temperatures dropped.
Native species, and zoo ferals from temperate or polar regions, would probably be all right. The white-tailed deer would mostly survive the winter, as always. But there were many feral species out there. Once when they were up in the thickets of the northwest corner of the park, coming back from the ninth hole, Spencer stopped in his tracks and everyone else froze instantly; this was one of the subgames they had invented, useful if they wanted not to spook animals.
“What in the fuck is that,” Spencer whispered urgently to Frank.
Frank stared. It was a big ox, or a small bull, or…
It was huge. Massive, heraldic, thick-haunched, like something out of a vision; one of those sights so unbelievable that if you were dreaming it you would have woken up on the spot.
Frank got out his FOG phone, moving very slowly, and pushed the button for Nancy. How many times had he done this in the past weeks, moving the phone as slowly as he could, whispering, “Nancy—hi, it’s Frank—can you tell me what I’m looking at?”
Pause, while Nancy looked at his phone’s GPS position and checked it on her big board.
“Aha. You’re looking at an aurochs.”
“A what?”
“We’re pretty sure it’s an aurochs. North Europe, ice age—”
Suddenly it looked familiar to Frank.
“—some Polish researchers took frozen DNA from one and cloned them a few years ago. Birthed from cows. They had an enclosure in their southern forest with a herd in it. We don’t know how these ones got here. Some kind of private dispersion, I think, like the guy who decided to transplant all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to North America, and gave us starlings among other problems.”
Frank took the phone from his ear, as Spencer’s face was contorting grotesquely to convey the question WHAT WHAT WHAT.
“Aurochs,” Frank whispered loudly.
Spencer’s face shifted into his look for the Great Ah Ha of Comprehension, then to Delight. He looked at the beast, foursquare on the ridge, and in slow motion crumpled to his knees, hands clasping his frisbee before him in prayer. Robin and Robert held their frisbees before them as well, grinning as they always did. Robin stretched his hands palm out over his head.
Its proportions were strange, Frank saw, the rear legs and haunches big and rounded. A creature from the cave paintings, sprung live into their world.
Spencer stood back up. He held his frisbee out to the other guys, waggled his eyebrows, mimed a throw at the aurochs: make it a target? Eyes ablaze: never had Frank seen the shaman in Spencer so clearly.
Of course they had already discussed throwing at animals. It would be the greatest thing in the world to make targets of the ubiquitous deer, for instance. The stalk, the throw, the strike—exhilarating. Like catch-and-release fishing, only better. No one disputed this. The animals would not be hurt. It would be hunting without killing.
But really, as Spencer himself had argued when they discussed it, they were hunting without killing already. And sometimes, if they hit them, animals would get hurt. That was the whole point of the killer frisbee theory. If they wanted the animals to prosper in the park, which after all was not so big—if they wanted animals to inhabit the world with them, which also was not so big—then they oughtn’t harass them by whacking them out of the blue with hard plastic disks. Best dharma practice was compassion for all sentient beings, thus using them for targets was contraindicated. So they had refused the temptation.
Now Spencer’s point seemed to be that this was a magical occasion, outside all everyday agreements. There stood an icon from the ice age—a living fossil, in effect, sprung to life from the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira—so that really they had to abandon their ordinary protocols to do justice to the beast, and enter the sacred space of the paleolithic mind. Make this magnificent creature their target as a sort of religious ritual, even a religious obligation one might say. All this Spencer conveyed by mime, making faces as contorted and clear as any demon mask.
“All at once,” Frank whispered. The others nodded.
Frank aimed and threw with the rest of them, and four disks flashed through the forest. One hit a tree, another struck the aurochs on the flank, causing him to bolt up the ridge and away, out of sight before they were even done screaming. They high-fived each other and ran to collect their frisbees and play on.
Each blustery afternoon changed his life. That was autumn, that was how it should feel, the landscape suffused with the ache of everything fleeing by. A new world every heartbeat. He had to incorporate this feeling of perpetual change, make it an aspect of optimodality. Of course everything always changed! How beautiful that the landscape sang that truth so clearly!
More than ever he loved being in his treehouse. He would have to find a way to continue doing it as the winter came on, even in the midst of storms. John Muir had climbed trees during storms to get a better view of them, and Frank knew from his mountaineering days that storms were a beautiful time to be out, if one were properly geared. He could pitch his tent on the plywood floor, and his heaviest sleeping bag would keep him warm in anything. Would he bounce around like a sailor at the top of a mast? He wanted to find out. John Muir had found out.
He would not move indoors. He did not want to, and he would not have to. The paleolithics had lived through ice ages, faced cold and storms for thousands of years. A new theory postulated that populations islanded by abrupt climate change had been forced to invent cooperative behaviors in bad weather many times, ultimately changing the gene and bringing about the last stages of human evolution. Snowshoes, clothing as warm as Frank’s, fire carriers. They had not only coped in the ice, but expanded their range.
Maybe they were going to have to do that again.
Clothing and shelter. At work Frank could see that civilized people did not think about these things. Most wore clothing suited to “room temperature” all the year round, thus sweltering in the summer and shivering in winter anytime they stepped out of their rooms—which however they rarely did. So they thought they were temperature tough guys, but really they were just indoors. They used their buildings as clothing, in effect, and heated or cooled these spaces to imitate what clothing did, no matter how crazy this was in energy terms. But they did it without thinking of it like that, without making that calculation. In the summer they wore blue jeans because of what people three generations before had seen in Marlboro ads. Blue jeans were the SUVs of pants, part of a fantasy outdoor life; Frank himself had long since changed to the Khembali ultralight cotton pants in summer, noting with admiration how the slight crinkle in the material kept most of the cloth off the skin.
Now as it got colder people still wore blue jeans, which were just as useless in cold as they were in heat. Frank meanwhile shifted piece by piece into his mountaineering gear. Some items needed cleaning, but were too delicate to run through a washing machine, so he had to find a dry cleaners on Connecticut, but then was pleasantly surprised to discover that they would take all his clothes; he had disliked going to the laundromat.
So, autumn weather, cool and windy: therefore, Patagonia’s capilene shirts, their wicking material fuzzy against the skin; a down vest with a down hood ready to pull onto his head; nylon wind-jacket; Patagonia’s capilene long underwear; wool pants; nylon windpants if windy. Thick Thurlo socks inside light Salomon hiking shoes. As an ensemble it actually looked pretty good, in an Outside magazine techno-geek way—a style which actually fit in pretty unobtrusively at NSF. Scientists signaled with their clothes just like anyone else, and their signal often proclaimed, “I am a scientist, I do things that Make Sense, so I Dress Sensibly,” which could resemble Frank’s mountaineering gear, as it meant recreational jackets with hoods, hiking boots, ski pants, wool shirts. So Frank could dress as a high-tech paleolithic and still look like any other NSF jock.
Work itself was becoming bogged down. The federal capital retained the psychic nature of the original swamp, and its function too, as all the toxins of the national life were dumped there to be broken down in its burbling pits. Trying to hack her way through this was getting Diane both results and resistance. She spent about fourteen hours a day, Frank reckoned, in meetings up on the eleventh floor at NSF and elsewhere in the area. Many of these meetings he only heard about, usually from Edgardo. Some agencies were interested in joining the cause, others resented the suggestion that things be done differently, considering it an attack on their turf. In general the farther removed from making policy, the more interested they were to help. But a fair number of agencies with regulatory power were fully turned by the industries they were supposed to regulate, and thus usually agents of the enemies of change; among these were the Department of Energy (nuclear and oil industry), the FDA (food and drug), the U.S. Forest Service and other parts of the Department of Agriculture (timber and ag), and the EPA (a curious mix, depending on division, but some of them bound to the pesticide industry and all under the thumb of the President). Republican administrations had regularly staffed these agencies with people chosen from the industries being regulated, and these people had then written regulations with the industries’ profits in mind. Now these agencies were not just toothless but actively dangerous, no matter how good their people were at the technocrat level. They were turned at the top.
Thus it was that Diane had to work around and against several of these agencies. It was becoming clear that part of NSF’s project had to include making efforts to get leadership of the captive agencies changed; and the turned agencies were now out to do the same to NSF. So, on top of everything else: war of the agencies. Edgardo went on a long paranoid aria, detailing just how bad it could be, all the ways Diane was going to have to be on guard. “I said to her I hope you have a very honest tax man, and she just laughed. ‘Two can play at that game,’ she said, ‘and I’m cleaner than they are.’ So off we go, off to the mattresses.”
Frank sang, “Territoriality, ooooop! Does that mean we’re screwed?”
“No, not necessarily. Diane will build alliances to get things done.”
In Frank’s meetings with her, Diane did not refer to this part of the struggle, preferring to discuss the technical aspects. The North Atlantic project was still being researched, and Diane still liked it very much, but she was concerned that they also pursue a vigorous hunt for some biologically based carbon capture method. Frank wondered if the legal and political problems inherent in releasing a genetically modified organism into the environment could ever be overcome; but he knew who to call about the technical aspects, of course.
He had been thinking of calling Marta and Yann again anyway. So, after a meeting with Diane, he steeled himself to the task. Thinking of the surveillance issue, he wondered if he should call them from a public phone, but realized both ends had to be unsurveilled for that to work. No, best to do this work in the open and let the chips fall where they may, the virtual spook stocks rise as they might. So he called them at their Small Delivery numbers, from his office.
“Hi Marta, it’s Frank. I wanted to talk to you and Yann about the carbon capture work you described to me. Can you tell me how that study is coming along, I mean just in general terms?”
“It’s going okay.”
“So, you know—in the absence of long-term field studies, have you gotten any back-of-the-envelopes on how quickly it might work, or how much it might draw down?”
“We can only extrapolate from lab results.”
“And what does that indicate, if anything?”
“It could be considerable.”
“I see.”
Marta said, “How’s the San Diego project coming along?”
“Oh good, good. I mean, I’m recused from any direct action on that front, but I’m following the process, and people at UCSD and in the biotech community there are excited about it. So I think something will happen.”
“And we’ll have a place in it?”
“Yes, they’re working on an offer. There’s going to be a kind of MacArthur award committee disbursing money, awarded without applications.”
“I see.” Marta’s voice was still skeptical, but Frank noted that she was not actively hostile either. “Well, I look forward to seeing how that goes.”
“It would surely help you, if you’re ever going to try to deploy anything like this lichen you’ve described.”
“We’ve got an array of options,” she said shortly, and would not elaborate. Maybe she too had a sense of the surveillance.
Next morning at NSF he found out from Edgardo that Diane had been in a fight with the President’s science advisor, Dr. Zacharius Strengloft. Strengloft had suggested to her in a meeting with the Senate Natural Resources Committee that NSF should keep to its job of disbursing grant money. Diane had told him in no uncertain terms that NSF was run by her and the National Science Board and no one else. Senators and staff who had witnessed the confrontation would of course take differing meanings from it.
Soon after that Diane convened a full meeting of the National Science Board, NSF’s board of directors. Clearly Diane wanted to make sure they were behind her for the coming battles. She made it a closed meeting, and when she came out of it Frank couldn’t tell if she had gotten what she wanted or not. But later she told him they had been almost unanimous in their support for NSF trying to coordinate a national response, even an international response. Then he saw again the little smile that crossed her face sometimes when she had gotten her way in these struggles. She seemed unflustered, even content. She shook her head as she told Frank about it, put a hand to his arm, smiled her little smile. What a strange game they were caught in, she seemed to say. But no one was going to intimidate her. Frank certainly wouldn’t want to be the one to try.
Meanwhile, to implement anything in the North Atlantic, they would have to coordinate plans with the UN, and really the whole world; get approvals, funding, the actual materials, whatever they might be. Eventually this need to liaise with international agencies impelled them to arrange a day’s meetings at the UN. Diane asked Frank to join her for these, and he was happy to agree.
When hanging with the bros in the evenings, Frank sometimes became curious about their plans for the winter. The picnic tables and fireplace were not going to hack it as winter furniture. The fireplace was such a misbegotten thing that it was useless for heating, cooking, or fire-gazing. Perhaps that was the point. Surely the men of the CCC, or whoever had built the thing, had to have known better. Some of the other picnic sites had open fire rings, but the bros had chosen to hang here by the pizza oven.
One night Frank arrived to find they had tried to solve this problem by commandeering a steel trash barrel and starting a fire inside it, a fire that only just flickered over its rim. Possibly the entire barrel gave off some radiant heat, and the fire would not be visible from a distance, of course, if that was a concern. But it was a miserable excuse for a campfire.
“Hey Perfesser!” Zeno bellowed. “How’s it hanging, man? We haven’t seen you for a while.”
The others chimed in with their habitual welcomes. “He’s too busy!” “Those coeds wanted him.”
They were all bulked up, thick with thrift shop sweaters and coats, and also, Frank was pleased to see, greasy down jackets. Old down jackets were probably cheap, being unfashionable; and there was nothing better in the cold.
“Hey,” he said. “Super long time. What was it, yesterday?”
“Yarrr. Ha ha ha.”
“I know you’ve done so much you want to tell me about.”
“HA!!!” They crowed their approval of this jape. “We ain’t done a fucking thing! Why should we?”
And yet it soon transpired that they had all experienced an extraordinary number of traumas since Frank last came around. They interrupted each other ceaselessly as they related them, making a mishmash that no one could have followed, but Frank knew from the start not to try. “Yeah right,” was all he had to say from time to time. Again it struck him how well they recalled scrapes, scuffles, or fights; they could reenact every move in slow motion, and did so when telling their tale—it was part of the tale, maybe the most interesting part: “I twisted like this, and he missed over my shoulder, like this, and then I ducked,” ducking and weaving against the absent but well-remembered opponent.
“We had to pull him right off the guy, yeah! I had to peel his fingers right off his neck! He was pounding his head right against the concrete.”
Finally they were done. Frank said, “Hey, your fire? It sucks.”
A shout of agreement and dissent. Zeno said, “Whaddya mean, dude? It’s perfect for shoving yer head in the can!”
“YARRR.”
“That’s the only way I’d see the actual fire,” Frank countered. “Why don’t you go where one of the good firepits are?”
They laughed at his naïveté. “That’d be too good for us!”
“Might make us a fire if we did that!”
One of them mimed a karate kick at the stone oven. “Piece of shit.”
“You need fire,” Frank said.
“We GOT a fire.”
“Can’t you knock the top of this thing off, or make a fire-ring next to it or something? Aren’t there any demolition sites or construction sites around here where you could get some cinder blocks?”
“Don’t be bringing the man down on us any more than he already is,” Fedpage said.
“Whatever,” Frank said. “You’re gonna freeze your asses off.”
“It’s a half-assed fire.”
“You have to put your hands right on the metal, it’s ridiculous.”
“No fucking way, it’s warm from here!”
“Yeah right.”
They settled in. The topic shifted to winter and winterizing in general, so Frank sat back and listened. No way were they going to respond to his words by jumping out into the night and putting together a decent fire ring. If that were their style they wouldn’t have been out here in the first place.
A few of them discussed the prospects of sleeping at the Metro stops; the regulars for these spots had dispersed, so that good grates were going unclaimed. You could nest on a good site all day. But that risked a rousting by the cops. But if you didn’t take the risk, you weren’t likely to find a good spot.
Zeno declared he was going to build a hut and sleep right there by their site. Others agreed immediately that good shelters could be made. It all sounded hypothetical to Frank, he thought they were just covering for the fact that they didn’t want to talk about where they really slept.
That made sense to Frank; he wasn’t telling people where he slept either. The bros were under a different kind of surveillance than he was, more erratic but potentially much more immediate, with consequences much worse than Frank’s (one hoped). They had police records, many of them extensive. Technically much of what they were doing was illegal, including being in Rock Creek Park at all. Luckily a lot of people were doing the same thing. It was the herd defense; predators would pick off the weak, but the bulk of the herd would be okay. The more the better, therefore, up to a point—a point they had not yet reached, even though many little squatter settlements and even what could be called shantytowns were now visible in flood-damaged parts of town, especially in the parks. Ultimately this might trigger some large-scale crackdown, and Rock Creek Park was high profile. But the gorge’s new ravine walls were steep and unstable, impossible to patrol at night. To clear the gorge they would have to call out the National Guard—both of them, as Zeno always added. If they did that the bros could slip away and come back later.
Meanwhile, out of sight, out of mind. They were off the grid, they had slung their hooks, they had lit out for the territory. The firelight bounced on their worn faces, etching each knock and crease. Little more of them could be seen, making it seem a circle of disembodied masks, or a Rockwell Kent woodblock.
“There was this guy living on the streets in San Francisco who turned out was like totally rich, he was heir to a fortune but he just liked living outdoors.”
“But he was a drunk too, right?”
“Fucking George Carlin is so funny.”
“They said I was grade ten but they wouldn’t give me dental.”
Blah blah blah. Frank recalled a fire from his youth: two climber gals slightly buzzed had come bombing into Camp Four around midnight and hauled him away from a dying fire, insisting that he join them in a midnight swim in the Merced River, and who could say no to that. Though it was shocking cold water and pitch black to boot, more a good idea than a comfortable reality, swimming with two naked California women in the Yosemite night. But then when they got out and staggered back to the fire, near dead from hypothermia, it had been necessary to pile on wood until it was a leaping yellow blaze and dance before it to catch every pulse of lifesaving heat. Even at the time Frank had understood that he would never see anything more beautiful.
Now he sat with a bunch of red-faced homeless guys bundled in their greasy down jackets, around a fire hidden at the bottom of a trash can. The contrast with the night at Camp Four was so complete it made him laugh. Somehow it made the two nights part of the same thing.
“We should build a real fire,” he said.
No one moved. Ashes rose on the smoke from the trash can. Frank reached in with a two-by-four and tried to stir it up enough to give them some flame over the rim. “If you have a fire but you can’t see it,” he said as he jabbed, “then you go out of your mind.”
Fedpage snorted. “Central heating, right?”
“So everyone’s crazy, yarr. Of course they are.”
“We certainly are.”
“Is that what did it hey?”
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”
“When did someone first say that, a million years ago? Oooop!”
“Hey there monkey man, quit that now! You sound like Meg Ryan in that movie.”
“Ha ha haaaa! That was so fucking funny.”
“She was faking it! She was faking it.”
“I’ll take it fake or not.”
“As if you could tell!”
“—greatest human vocalization ever recorded.”
“Yeah right, you obviously don’t know your porn.”
Things that would warm a body: laughter; reenacting fights; playing air guitar; playing with the fire; talking about sex; thinking about climber gals.
Knocking a stone oven apart would definitely warm the body. Frank got up. What he needed was a sledgehammer and a crowbar; what they had were some lengths of two-by-four and an old aluminum baseball bat.
One stone in the little opening at the top was loose in its cement. Frank moved to what looked like the right angle and smashed the stone with a two-by-four. The bros were pleased at the diversion, they guffawed and urged him on. He knocked the first stone down into the firepit, reached into the ashes and rolled it out. After that it was a matter of knocking stones off one at a time. He used the longest two-by-four and pounded away. The cement was old, and gradually the firepit came down.
Knee high it made a sensible firepit, with a gap in one side where the old doorway had been. He filled that gap with stones. There were enough left over to make another firepit if they wanted one. Or maybe bench supports, if they found some planks.
“Okay, let’s move the trash can fire into the pit,” he said.
“How you gonna pick it up? That can is red hot down there at the bottom, don’t you pick that up!”
“You’ll burn your fucking hands off man!”
“It’s not red hot,” Frank pointed out. “Let’s a couple of us grab it around the top. Wear gloves and tilt it, and we’ll lift the bottom with the studs here.”
“Roll and burn your fucking leg off!”
“Yeah right!”
But Zeno was willing to do it, and so the rest gathered round. The ones who had gloves grasped the rim, lifted, and tilted. Frank and Andy wedged studs under the bottom from opposite sides and lifted it up. With a whoosh the whole fiery mass sparked into the new ring and blasted up into the night. Howls chased the uprush of smoke and sparks.
They sat around the cheery blaze, suddenly much more visible to each other.
“Now we need a pizza!”
“Who’ll get a pizza?”
They all looked at Frank. “Ah shit,” he said. “Where’s Cutter.”
“Get some beer too!” Zeno said, with the same fake laugh as before.
Kicking through piles of fallen leaves, the cold air struck him like a splash of water in the face. It felt good. He had to laugh: all his life he had traveled to mountains and polar regions to breathe air this bracing, and here it was, right in the middle of this ridiculous city. Maybe the seasons would become his terrain now, and the coming winter be like high altitude or high latitude. It could be good.
The afternoon before he and Diane were going to leave for New York, he played a game of frisbee golf with the frisbee guys. It was a perfect October day, Indian summer, and in the amber horizontal light of sunset they threw across a stiff western breeze that brought a continuous rain of leaves spinnerdrifting down on them. Frank slung his disk through the forest’s ticker-tape parade, hooting with the rest, and was deep in the game when they ran by the bros’ clearing.
Spencer stopped so abruptly that Frank almost rammed into him, thinking, Aurochs, but then he saw half a dozen men wearing flak jackets, aiming big assault rifles at the astonished bros.
“Get down on the ground!” one of the men shouted. “Get down right now! GET DOWN.”
The bros dropped awkwardly, faces on the ground.
The frisbee players stayed frozen. One of the men turned and said to them, “We’ll be just a minute more here. Why don’t you be on your way.”
Frank and the frisbee guys nodded and took off down Ross, jogging until they were around the corner, then stopping and looking back.
“What the fuck was that?”
“A bust.”
“Yeah but who?”
“We’ll find out on the way back.”
They played on, distracted, missing shot after shot. On the way back they hurried the pace, and came into site 21 huffing.
The guys were still there, sitting around—all but Jory.
“Hey guys what was that all about?” Spencer cried as they ran in. “That looked horrible!”
“They rousted us,” Zeno said.
Redbeard shook his head resentfully. “They made us lie down on the ground like we were criminals.”
“They didn’t want any trouble,” said Zeno. “They thought Jory might be carrying.”
Jory, the only one who had ever made Frank feel uncomfortable.
“They were ready to shoot us,” Redbeard complained.
“Sure they were. They probably heard Jory was armed.”
“So it was Jory they were after?” Spencer said. “What did he do?”
“Jory’s the one who beat up on Ralph! Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“Yes you do, it was in the papers. Ralph got pounded by Jory and a guy, down at Eighteen.”
“We had to pull him right off the guy, yeah! I had to peel his fingers right off his neck! He was pounding his head right against the concrete.”
“Yeah, so Ralph was in the hospital after that, but then a couple weeks later Jory showed up again and started hanging out with us like nothing had happened.”
“Jesus,” Frank said. “Why didn’t you go to the police and get rid of this guy?”
They shouted “YEAH RIGHT” at him in unison. Then, interrupting each other in their eagerness:
“What do you think they’re going to do?”
“They’ll call in and find my outstandings and get my parole officer—”
“Fuck that, they’ll beat on you—”
“You could end up put away for fucking years.”
Zeno’s grin was sharklike. “Some things you just gotta live with, Doctor. The police are not there for us. Assholes come hang with us, that’s just the way it is.”
“Hard to believe,” Frank said.
“Is it?”
On they ran, and after they had finished their game, Frank asked Spencer about it. “So they can’t get help from the police if they need it?”
Spencer shook his head. “We can’t either, for that matter. People without a legal place of residence are kind of outside the legal system. It’s very property-based.”
“Don’t you guys have places to live?”
Spencer, Robin, and Robert laughed.
“We do have places to live,” Spencer said, “but we don’t pay for them.”
“What do you do then?”
“We wander a bit. Just like you, right? We hunt and gather in the technosurround.”
“A godly state,” Robin said.
“Come to dinner and see,” Spencer offered. “The fregans in Klingle Valley are having a potluck.”
“I don’t have anything to bring.”
“Don’t worry. There’ll be enough. Maybe you can buy a bottle of wine on the way over.”
On the walk through the park to Klingle Valley, one of the park tributaries of Rock Creek, Spencer and the others explained to Frank that they were ferals.
“You use that word?”
That was what they usually called their mode these days, yes; also squatters, scavengers, or fregans. There were ferals in every city. It was a kind of urban wilderness thing.
“Fregan, what’s that?”
“It’s like vegan, only they’ll only eat food that they’ve gotten for free.”
“Say what?”
“They eat out of dumpsters and such. Scavenge food going to waste.”
“Whoah.”
“Think about how many restaurants there are in D.C.,” said Spencer. So many fine restaurants, so much wonderful food, and a certain percentage of it thrown away every night. Perfectly good fresh food. That was just the way the restaurant business operated. So, if you knew the routine at the dumpsters, and you resolved never to spend money on food, but always either to grow it or scavenge it—or kill it—then you were a fregan. They were going to a fregan potluck that very night. There would be lots of venison.
The house hosting the potluck was boarded up, having been badly damaged in a fire. They slipped in the back to find a party, a whole bunch of people, young and not so young, some tattooed and pierced, others tie-dyed and rastafied. There was a fire in the fireplace, but the flue wasn’t drawing well; added to this smokiness was a funky mix of wet dog, patchouli, potluck food, and whatever was burning in a hookah in the corner: a mix of hash, cigars, and clove cigarettes, judging by the cloud Frank walked though.
The frisbee players were greeted warmly, and Spencer was acclaimed as some kind of local celebrity, a gypsy king. He introduced Frank very informally, and hustled him through to the food table—“always wisest to get it while you can”—and they feasted on a selection of Washington restauranteering’s finest, slightly reconstituted for the occasion: steaks, quiche, salad, bread. Spencer ate like a wolf, and by the time they were done Frank was stuffed as well.
“See?” Spencer said as they sat on the floor watching the crowd flow by. “There are lots of empty buildings in this city. If you work as a team and spend your time taking care of business, then you can find shelter and food for free. Scavenge clothes or buy in thrift shops, talk with people or play frisbee for fun, walk wherever you go—you can step outside the money economy. Live off the excess, so you don’t add to the waste. In fact you reduce waste. Do a little street theater down in the lawyer district for change, even do day labor or take a job. You don’t actually need money, but a little bit helps.”
“Wow,” Frank said. “And about how many people are doing this?”
“Hard to tell. It’s best to stay under the radar, because of just the sort of police issues you were asking the bros about. I think there’s several hundred people at least in Northwest, maybe a thousand, who think of themselves as fregans or ferals. Obviously there are a lot more homeless people than that, but I’m talking about the people going at it like we are.”
“Wow.”
“It makes a huge difference how you think about what you’re doing.”
“That’s very true.”
A group in the corner started playing music: two guitars, mandolin, fiddle, wooden flute, a Bombay harmonium. Two young women came over to haul Spencer to his feet; a command performance, he was needed on percussion.
Frank said, “Thanks Spencer, I’m going to go soon.”
“That’s all right man, there’ll be more of these. Frisbee tomorrow?”
“No, I’ve got to go to New York. I’ll check in when I get back.”
“See you then.”