Charlie’s daytime outings with Joe had to happen on weekends now. Even though they were past the First Sixty Days, and had gotten a pretty good run out of them, they were trying to keep the momentum going, and things kept popping up to derail their plans, sometimes intentional problems created by the opposition, sometimes neutral matters created by the sheer size of the system. Roy was pushing so hard that sometimes he even almost lost his cool. Charlie had never seen that, and would have thought it impossible, at least on the professional level. Calmness at speed was his signature style, as with certain surfing stars. And even now he persisted with that style, or tried to; but the workload was so huge it was hard. They were far past the time when he and Charlie were able to chat about things like they used to. Now their phone conversations went something like:

“Charlie it’s Roy have you met with IPCC?”

“No, we’re both scheduled to meet with the World Bank on Friday.”

“Can you meet them and the Bank team at six today instead?”

“I was going to go home at five.”

“Six then?”

“Well if you think—”

“Good okay bye.”

“Bye”—said to the empty connection.

Charlie stared at his phone and cursed. He cursed Roy, Phil, the World Bank, the Republican Party, and the universe. Because it was nobody’s fault.

He hit the phone button for the daycare.

He was going to have to carve time for an in-person talk with Roy, a talk about what he could and couldn’t do. That would be an unusual meeting. Even though Charlie was now at the White House fifty hours a week, he still never saw Roy in person; Roy was always somewhere else. They spoke on the phone even when one of them was in the West Wing and the other in the Old Executive Offices, less than a hundred yards away. For a second Charlie couldn’t even remember what Roy looked like.

So; call to arrange for “extended stay” for Joe, a development his teachers were used to. This meeting took precedence, because they needed the World Bank executing Phil’s program; in the war of the agencies, now very intense, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were among the most mulish of their passive-aggressive opponents. Phil had the power to hire and fire the upper echelons in both agencies, which was good leverage, but it would be better to do something less drastic, to keep the midlevels from shattering. A meeting with both them and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN organization, might be a good venue for exerting some pressure. The IPCC had spent many years advocating action on the climate front, and all that time they had been flatly ignored by the World Bank. If there was now a face-off, a great reckoning in a little room, then it could get interesting. Charlie hoped so, because whether it was useful or not, Joe was going to have to get by for the extra hours.

But the meeting was a disappointment. The two groups came from such different worldviews that it was only an illusion they were speaking the same language; for the most part they used different vocabularies, and when by chance they used the same words, they meant different things by them. They were aware at some level of this underlying conflict, but could not address it; and so everyone was tense, with old grievances unsayable and yet fully present.

The World Bank guys said something about nothing getting cheaper than oil for the next fifty years, ignoring what the IPCC guys had just finished saying about the devastating effects of fifty more years of burning oil. They had not heard that, apparently. They believed everything was fungible with everything else, and defended having invested ninety-four percent of the World Bank’s energy investments in oil exploration as necessary, given the world’s dependence on oil—apparently unaware of the circular aspect of their argument. And, being economists, they were still exteriorizing costs without even noticing it or acknowledging such exteriorization had been conclusively demonstrated to falsify standard accounting of profit and loss. Everything fungible: it was as if the world were not real, as if the physical world, reported on by scientists and witnessed by all, could be ignored, and because their fictitious numbers therefore added up, no one could complain.

Charlie gritted his teeth as he listened and took notes. It was science versus capitalism, yet again. The IPCC guys spoke for science and said the obvious things, pointing out the physical constraints of the planet, the carbon load now in the atmosphere altering everything, and the resultant need for heavy investment in clean technology by all concerned, including the World Bank, as one of the great drivers of globalization. But they had said it before to no avail, and now it was happening again. The World Bank guys talked about rates of return and the burden on investors, and the unacceptable doubling of the price of a kilowatt-hour. Everyone there had said all these things before, with the same lack of communication and absence of concrete results.

Charlie thought of Joe, over at the daycare. He had never stayed there long enough even to see what they did all day long. Guilt stuck him like a sliver under the fingernail. In a crowd of strangers, fourteen hours a day. The Bank guy was going on about differential costs, “and that’s why it’s going to be oil for the next twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty years,” he concluded. “None of the alternatives are competitive.”

Charlie’s pencil tip snapped. “Competitive for what?” he demanded.

He had not spoken until that point, and now the edge in his voice stopped the discussion. Everyone stared at him. He stared back at the World Bank guys.

“Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about fifty dollars a ton, but in your model no one pays it. The carbon that British Petroleum burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a damage bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so actually it’s thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported a profit of twenty-three billion, but if you added the damage cost it would be eight billion in the red. These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. You’re helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the thousand gigatons of carbon that you are describing as inevitable because of your financial shell games, then two-thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It’s the stupidest head-in-the-sand response possible.”

The World Bank guys flinched at this. “Well,” one of them said, “we don’t see it that way.”

Charlie said, “That’s the trouble. You see it the way the banking industry sees it, and they make money by manipulating money no matter what happens in the real world. You’ve spent a trillion dollars of American taxpayers’ money over the lifetime of the Bank, and there’s nothing to show for it. You go into poor countries and force them to sell their assets to foreign investors and to switch from subsistence agriculture to cash crops, then when the prices of those crops collapse you call this nicely competitive on the world market. The local populations starve and you then insist on austerity measures even though your actions have shattered their economy. You order them to cut their social services so they can pay off their debts to you and to your private associates, and you devalue their real assets and then buy them on the cheap and sell them elsewhere for more. The assets of that country have been strip-mined and now belong to international finance. That’s your idea of development. You were intended to be the Marshall Plan, and instead you’re carpetbaggers.”

One of the World Bank guys muttered, “But tell us what you really think,” while putting his papers in his briefcase. His companion snickered, and this gave him courage to continue: “I’m not gonna stay and listen to this,” he said.

“That’s fine,” Charlie said. “You can leave now and get a head start on looking for a new job.”

The man blinked hostilely at him. But he did not otherwise move.

Charlie stared back at him for a while, working to collect himself. He lowered his voice and spoke as calmly as he could manage. He outlined the basics of the administration’s new mission architecture, including the role that the World Bank was now to play; but he couldn’t handle going into detail with people who were furious at him, and in truth had never been listening. It was time for what Frank called limited discussion. So Charlie wrapped it up, then gave them a few copies of the mission architecture outline, thick books that had been bound just that week. “Your part of the plan is here. Take it back and talk it over with your people, and come to us with your plan to enact it. We look forward to hearing your ideas. I’ve got you scheduled for a meeting on the sixth of next month, and I’ll expect your report then.” Although, since we will be decapitating your organization, it won’t be you guys doing the reporting, he didn’t add.

And he gathered his papers and left the room.

—

Well, shit. What a waste of everyone’s time.

He had been sweating, and now out on the street he chilled. His hands were shaking. He had lost it. It was amazing how angry he had gotten. Phil had told him to go kick ass, but it did no good to yell at people like that. It had been unprofessional; out of control; counterproductive. Only senators got to rave like that. Staffers, no.

Well, what was done was done. Now it was time to pick up Joe and go home. Anna wouldn’t believe what he had done. In fact, he realized, he would not be able to tell her about it; she would be too appalled. She would say, “Oh Charlie,” and he would be ashamed of himself.

But at least it was time to get Joe. At this point Joe had been at daycare for twelve hours. “God damn it,” Charlie said viciously, all of a sudden as angry as he had been in the meeting, and glad he had shouted. Years of repressed anger at the fatuous destructiveness of the World Bank and the system they worked for had been unleashed all at once; the wonder was he had been as polite as he had. The anger still boiled in him uselessly, caustic to his own poor gut.

—

Joe, however, seemed unconcerned by his long day. “Hi Dad!” he said brightly from the blocks corner, where he had the undivided attention of a young woman. “We’re playing chess!”

“Wow,” Charlie said, startled; but by the girl’s sweet grin, and the chess pieces strewn about the board and the floor, he saw that it was Joe’s version of chess, and the mayhem had been severe. “That’s really good, Joe! But now I’m here and it’s time, so can we help clean up and go?”

“Okay Dad.”

On the Metro ride home, Joe seemed tired but happy. “We had Cheerios for snack.”

“Oh good, you like Cheerios. Are you still hungry?”

“No, I’m good. Are you hungry, Dad?”

“Well, yes, a little bit.”

“Wanna cracker?” And he produced a worn fragment of a Wheat Thin from his pants pocket, dusted with lint.

“Thanks, Joe, that’s nice. Sure, I’ll take it.” He took the cracker and ate it. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Beggars?”

“People who don’t have anything. People who ask you for money.”

“Money?”

“You know, money. The stuff people pay with, when they buy things.”

“Buy things?”

“Come on Joe. Please. It’s hard to explain what money is. Dollars. Quarters. Beggars are people who don’t have much money and they don’t have much of a way to get money. All they’ve got is the World Bank ripping their hearts out and eating their lives. So, the saying means, when you’re like a beggar, you can’t be too picky about choosing things when they’re offered to you.”

“What about Han? Is she too picky?”

“Well, I don’t know. Who’s Han?”

“Han is the morning teacher. She doesn’t like bagels.”

“I see! Well, that sounds too picky to me.”

“Right,” Joe said. “You get what you get.”

“That’s true,” Charlie said.

“You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit!” Joe declared, and beamed. Obviously this was a saying often repeated. A mantra of sorts.

“That’s very true,” Charlie said. “Although to tell the truth, I did just throw a fit.”

“Oh well.” Joe was observing the people getting on at the UDC stop, and Charlie looked up too. Students and workers, going home late. “These things happen,” Joe said. He sat leaning against Charlie, his body relaxed, murmuring something to the tiny plastic soldier grasped in his fist, looking at the people.

Then they were at the Bethesda stop, and up the long escalator to the street, and walking down Wisconsin together with the cars roaring by.

“Dad, let’s go in and get a cookie! Cookie!”

It was that block’s Starbucks, one of Joe’s favorite places.

“Oh Joe, we’ve got to get home, Mom and Nick are waiting to see us.”

“Sure Dad. Whatever you say Dad.”

“Please, Joe! Don’t say that!”

“Okay Dad.”

Charlie shook his head as they walked on, his throat tight. He clutched Joe’s hand and let Joe swing their arms up and down.