“Ow!” Joe howled.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING!” Charlie shouted in his face. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DON’T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!”
Joe, amazed, stopped howling for a moment. He stared at his father, face crimson. Then he recommenced howling.
Charlie shifted into a cross-legged position, hefted the crying boy into his lap. He was shaking, his heart was pounding; he could feel it tripping away madly in his hands and chest. In an old reflex he put his thumb to the other wrist and watched the seconds pass on his watch for fifteen seconds. Multiply by four. Impossible. One hundred and eighty beats a minute. Surely that was impossible. Sweat was pouring out of all his skin at once. He was gasping.
The parade of trucks and cars continued to roar by, inches away. Wisconsin Avenue was a major truck route from the Beltway into the city. Most of the trucks entirely filled the right lane, from curb to lane line, and most were moving at about forty miles an hour.
“Why do you do that,” Charlie whispered into his boy’s hair. Suddenly he was filled with fear, and some kind of dread or despair. “It’s just crazy.”
“Ow,” Joe said.
Big shuddering sighs racked them both.
Charlie’s phone rang. He clicked it on and held an earplug to his ear.
“Hi love.”
“Oh hi hon!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh nothing, nothing. I’ve just been chasing Joe around. We’re at the park.”
“Wow, you must be cooking. Isn’t it the hottest part of the day?”
“Yeah it is, almost, but we’ve been having fun so we stayed. We’re about to head back now.”
“Okay, I won’t keep you. I just wanted to check if we had any plans for next weekend.”
“None that I know of.”
“Okay, good. Because I had an interesting thing happen this morning, I met a bunch of people downstairs, new to the building. They’re like Tibetans, I think, only they live on an island. They’ve taken the office space downstairs that the travel agency used to have.”
“That’s nice dear.”
“Yes. I’m going to have lunch with them, and if it seems like a good idea I might ask them over for dinner sometime, if you don’t mind.”
“No, that’s fine snooks. Whatever you like. It sounds interesting.”
“Great, okay. I’m going to go meet them soon, I’ll tell you about it.”
“Okay good.”
“Okay bye dove.”
“Bye love, talk to you.”
Charlie clicked off.
After ten giant breaths he stood, lifting Joe in his arms. Joe buried his face in Charlie’s neck. Shakily Charlie retraced their course. It was somewhere between fifty and a hundred yards. Rivulets of sweat ran down his ribs, and off his forehead into his eyes. He wiped them against Joe’s shirt. Joe was sweaty too. When he reached their stuff Charlie swung Joe around, down into his backpack. For once Joe did not resist. “Sowy Daddy,” he said, and fell asleep as Charlie swung him onto his back.
Charlie took off walking. Joe’s head rested against his neck, a sensation that had always pleased him before. Sometimes Joe would even suckle the tendon there. Now it was like the touch of some meaning so great that Charlie couldn’t bear it, a huge cloudy aura of danger and love. He started to cry, wiped his eyes, shook it off as if shaking away a nightmare. Hostages to fortune, he thought. You get married, have kids, you give up such hostages to fortune. No avoiding it, no help for it. It’s just the price you pay for such love. His son was a complete maniac, and it only made him love him more.
He walked hard for most of an hour, through all the neighborhoods he had come to know so well in his years of lonely Mr. Momhood. The vestiges of an older way of life lay under the trees like a network of ley lines: rail beds, canal systems, Indian trails, even deer trails, all could still be discerned. Charlie walked them sightlessly. The ductile world drooped around him in the heat. Sweat lubricated his every move.
Slowly he regained his sense of normalcy. Just an ordinary day with Joe and Da.
The residential streets of Bethesda and Chevy Chase were in many ways quite beautiful. It had mostly to do with the immense trees, and the grass underfoot. Green everywhere. On a weekday afternoon like this there was almost no one to be seen. The slight hilliness was just right for walking. Tall old hardwoods gave some relief from the heat; above them the sky was an incandescent white. The trees were undoubtedly second or even third growth, there couldn’t be many old-growth hardwoods anywhere east of the Mississippi. Still they were old trees, and tall. Charlie had never shifted out of his California consciousness, in which open landscapes were the norm and the desire, so that on the one hand he found the omnipresent forest claustrophobic—he pined for a pineless view—while on the other hand it remained always exotic and compelling, even slightly ominous or spooky. The dapple of leaves at every level, from the ground to the highest canopy, was a perpetual revelation to him; nothing in his home ground or his bookish sense of forests had prepared him for this vast and delicate venation of the air. On the other hand he longed for a view of distant mountains as if for oxygen itself. On this day especially he felt stifled and gasping.
His phone beeped again, and he pulled the earplugs out of his pocket and stuck them in his ears, clicked the set on.
“Hello.”
“Hey Charlie I don’t want to bug you, but are you and Joe okay?”
“Oh yeah, thanks Roy. Thanks for checking back in, I forgot to call you.”
“So you found him.”
“Yeah I found him, but I had to stop him running into traffic, and he was upset and I forgot to call back.”
“Hey that’s okay. It’s just that I was wondering, you know, if you could finish off this draft with me.”
“I guess.” Charlie sighed. “To tell the truth, Roy boy, I’m not so sure how well this work-at-home thing is going for me these days.”
“Oh you’re doing fine. You’re Phil’s gold standard. But look, if now isn’t a good time …”
“No no, Joe’s asleep on my back. It’s fine. I’m still just kind of freaked out.”
“Sure, I can imagine. Listen we can do it later, although I must say we do need to get this thing staffed out soon or else Phil might get caught short. Dr. Strangelove”—this was their name for the President’s science advisor—“has been asking to see our draft too.”
“I know, okay talk to me. I can tell you what I think anyway.”
So for a while as he walked he listened to Roy read sentences from his draft, and then discussed with him the whys and wherefores, and possible revisions. Roy had been Phil’s chief of staff ever since Wade Norton hit the road and became an advisor in absentia, and after years of staffing for the House Resources committee (called the Environment committee until the Gingrich Congress renamed it), he was deeply knowledgeable, and sharp too; one of Charlie’s favorite people. And Charlie himself was so steeped in the climate bill he could see it in his head, indeed it helped him now just to hear it, without the print before him to distract him. As if someone were telling him a bedtime story.
Eventually, however, some question of Roy’s couldn’t