Forty Signs of Rain
‘Still interested in some pizza?’ Anna asked. ‘If pizza is okay?’
‘Oh yes,’ the young one said. The two men got to their feet, the old man in several distinct moves; one leg was stiff. ‘We love pizza.’ The old man nodded politely, glancing at his young assistant, who said something to him rapidly, in a language that while not guttural did seem mostly to be generated at the back of the mouth.
As they crossed the atrium to Pizzeria Uno Anna said uncertainly, ‘Do you eat pizza where you come from?’
The younger man smiled. ‘No. But in Nepal I have eaten pizza in tea houses.’
‘Are you vegetarian?’
‘No. Tibetan Buddhism has never been vegetarian. There were not enough vegetables.’
‘So you are Tibetans! But I thought you said you were an island nation?’
‘We are. But originally we came from Tibet. The old ones, like Rudra Cakrin here, left when the Chinese took over. The rest of us were born in India, or on Khembalung itself.’
‘I see.’
They entered the restaurant, where big booths were walled by high wooden partitions. The three of them sat in one, Anna across from the two men.
‘I am Drepung,’ the young man said, ‘and the rimpoche here, our ambassador to America, is Gyatso Sonam Rudra Cakrin.’
‘I’m Anna Quibler,’ Anna said, and shook hands with each of them. The men’s hands were heavily callused.
Their waiter appeared. She did not appear to notice the unusual garb of the men, but took their orders with sublime indifference. After a quick muttered consultation, Drepung asked Anna for suggestions, and in the end they ordered a combination pizza with everything on it.
Anna sipped her water. ‘Tell me more about Khembalung, and about your new embassy.’
Drepung nodded. ‘I wish Rudra Cakrin himself could tell you, but he is still taking his English lessons, I’m afraid. Apparently they are going very badly. In any case, you know that China invaded Tibet in 1950, and that the Dalai Lama escaped to India in 1959?’
‘Yes, that sounds familiar.’
‘Yes. And during those years, and ever since then too, many Tibetans have moved to India to get away from the Chinese, and closer to the Dalai Lama. India took us in very hospitably, but when the Chinese and Indian governments had their disagreement over their border in 1960, the situation became very awkward for India. They were already in a bad way with Pakistan, and a serious controversy with China would have been …’ He searched for the word, waggling a hand.
‘Too much?’ Anna suggested.
‘Yes. Much too much. So, the support India had been giving to the Tibetans in exile –’
Rudra Cakrin made a little hiss.
‘Small to begin with, although very helpful nevertheless,’ Drepung added, ‘shrank even further. It was requested that the Tibetan community in Dharamsala make itself as small and inconspicuous as possible. The Dalai Lama and his government did their best, and many Tibetans were relocated to other places in India, mostly in the far south. But elsewhere as well. Then some more years passed, and there were some, how shall I say, arguments or splits within the Tibetan exile community, too complicated to go into, I assure you. I can hardly understand them myself. But in the end a group called the Yellow Hat School took the offer of this island of ours, and moved there. This was just before the India – Pakistan war of 1970, unfortunately, so the timing was bad, and everything was on the hush-hush for a time. But the island was ours from that point, as a kind of protectorate of India, like Sikkim, only not so formally arranged.’
‘Is Khembalung the island’s original name?’
‘No. I do not think it had a name before. Most of our sect lived at one time or another in the valley of Khembalung. So that name was kept, and we have shifted away from the Dalai Lama’s government in Dharamsala, to a certain extent.’
At the sound of the words ‘Dalai Lama’ the old monk made a face and said something in Tibetan.
‘The Dalai Lama is still number one with us,’ Drepung clarified. ‘It is a matter of some religious controversies with his associates. A matter of how best to support him.’
Anna said, ‘I thought the mouth of the Ganges was in Bangladesh?’
‘Much of it is. But you must know that it is a very big delta, and the west side of it is in India. Part of Bengal. Many islands. The Sundarbans? You have not heard?’
Their pizzas arrived, and Drepung began talking between big bites. ‘Lightly populated islands, the Sundarbans. Some of them anyway. Ours was uninhabited.’
‘Did you say uninhabitable?’
‘No no. Inhabitable, obviously.’
Another noise from Rudra Cakrin.
‘People with lots of choices might say they were uninhabitable,’ Drepung went on. ‘And they may yet become so. They are best for tigers. But we have done well there. We have become like tigers. Over the years we have built a nice town. A little seaside potala for Gyatso Rudra and the other lamas. Schools, houses – hospital. All that. And sea walls. The whole island has been ringed by dykes. Lots of work. Hard labour.’ He nodded as if personally acquainted with this work. ‘Dutch advisors helped us. Very nice. Our home, you know? Khembalung has moved from age to age. But now …’ He waggled a hand again, took another slice of pizza, bit into it.
‘Global warming?’ Anna ventured.
He nodded, swallowed. ‘Our Dutch friends suggested that we establish an embassy here, to join their campaign to influence American policy in these matters.’
Anna quickly bit into her pizza, so that she would not reveal the thought that had struck her, that the Dutch must be desperate indeed if they had been reduced to help like this. She thought things over as she chewed. ‘So here you are,’ she said. ‘Have you been to America before?’
Drepung shook his head. ‘None of us have.’
‘It must be pretty overwhelming.’
He frowned at this word. ‘I have been to Calcutta.’
‘Oh I see.’
‘This is very different, of course.’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
She liked him: his musical Indian English, his round face and big liquid eyes, his ready smile. The two men made quite a contrast: Drepung young and tall, round-faced, with a kind of baby-fat look; Rudra Cakrin old, small and wizened, his face lined with a million wrinkles, his cheekbones and narrow jaw prominent in an angular, nearly fleshless face.
The wrinkles were laugh lines, however, combined with the lines of a wide-eyed expression of surprise that bunched up his forehead. Despite his noises and muttering under Drepung’s account, he still seemed cheerful enough. He certainly attacked his pizza with the same enthusiasm as his young assistant. With their shaved heads they shared a certain family resemblance.
She said, ‘I suppose going from Tibet to a tropical island must have been a bigger shock than coming from the island to here.’
‘I suppose. I was born in Khembalung myself, so I don’t know for sure. But the old ones like Rudra here, who made that very move, seem to have adjusted quite well. Just to have any kind of home is a blessing, I think you will find.’
Anna nodded. The two of them did project a certain calm. They sat in the booth as if there was no hurry to go anywhere else. Anna couldn’t imagine any such state of mind. She was always in a tearing hurry. She tried to match their air of being at ease. At ease in Arlington, Virginia, after a lifetime on an island in the Ganges. Well, the climate would be familiar. But everything else had to have changed quite stupendously.
And, on closer examination, there was a certain guardedness to them. Drepung glanced surreptitiously at their waiter; he looked at the pedestrians passing by; he watched Anna herself, all with a slightly cautious look, reminding her of the pained expression she had seen earlier in the day.
‘How is it that you came to rent a space in this particular building?’
Drepung paused and considered this question for a surprisingly long time. Rudra Cakrin asked him something and he replied, and Rudra said something more.
‘We had some advice there also,’ Drepung said. ‘The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has been helping us, and their office is located on Wilson Boulevard, nearby.’
‘I didn’t know that. They’ve helped you to meet people?’
‘Yes, with the Dutch, and with some island nations, like Fiji and Tuvalu.’
‘Tuvalu?’
‘A very small country in the Pacific. They have perhaps been less than helpful to the cause, telling people that sea level has risen in their area of the Pacific but not elsewhere, and asking for financial compensation for this from Australia and other countries.’
‘In their area of the Pacific only?’
‘Measurements have not confirmed the claim.’ Drepung smiled. ‘But I can assure you, if you are on a storm track and spring tides are upon you, it can seem like sea level has risen quite a great deal.’
‘I’m sure.’
Anna thought it over while she ate. It was good to know that they hadn’t just rented the first office they found vacant. Nevertheless, their effort in Washington looked to her to be underpowered at this point. ‘You should meet my husband,’ she said. ‘He works for a senator, one who is up on all these things, a very helpful guy, the chair of the foreign relations committee.’
‘Ah – Senator Chase?’
‘Yes. You know about him?’
‘He has visited Khembalung.’
‘Has he? Well, I’m not surprised, he’s been every – he’s been a lot of places. Anyway, my husband Charlie works for him as an environmental policy advisor. It would be good for you to talk to Charlie and get his perspective on your situation. He’ll be full of suggestions for things you could do.’
‘That would be an honour.’
‘I don’t know if I’d go that far. But useful.’
‘Useful, yes. Perhaps we could have you to dinner at our residence.’
‘Thank you, that would be nice. But we have two small boys and we’ve lost all our baby-sitters, so to tell the truth it would be easier if you and some of your colleagues came to our place. In fact I’ve already talked to Charlie about this, and he’s looking forward to meeting you. We live in Bethesda, just across the border from the District. It’s not far.’
‘Red line.’
‘Yes, very good. Red line, Bethesda stop. I can give you directions from there.’
She got out her calendar, checked the coming weeks. Very full, as always. ‘How about a week from Friday? On a Friday we’ll be able to relax a little.’
‘Thank you,’ Drepung said, ducking his head. He and Rudra Cakrin had an exchange in Tibetan. ‘That would be very kind. And on the full moon, too.’
‘Is it? I’m afraid I don’t keep track.’
‘We do. The tides, you see.’
THREE Intellectual Merit
Water flows through the oceans in steady recycling patterns, determined by the Coriolis force and the particular positions of the continents in our time. Surface currents can move in the opposite direction to bottom currents below them, and often do, forming systems like giant conveyor belts of water. The largest one is already famous, at least in part: the Gulf Stream is a segment of a warm surface current that flows north up the entire length of the Atlantic, all the way to Norway and Greenland. There the water cools and sinks, and begins a long journey south on the Atlantic ocean floor, to the Cape of Good Hope and then east towards Australia, and even into the Pacific, where the water upwells and rejoins the surface flow, west to the Atlantic for the long haul north again. The round trip for any given water molecule takes about a thousand years.
Cooling salty water sinks more easily than fresh water. Trade winds sweep clouds generated in the Gulf of Mexico west over Central America to dump their rain in the Pacific, leaving the remaining water in the Atlantic that much saltier. So the cooling water in the North Atlantic sinks well, aiding the power of the Gulf Stream. If the surface of the North Atlantic were to become rapidly fresher, it would not sink so well when it cooled, and that could stall the conveyor belt. The Gulf Stream would have nowhere to go, and would slow down, and sink farther south. Weather everywhere would change, becoming windier and drier in the northern hemisphere, and colder in places, especially in Europe.
The sudden desalination of the North Atlantic might seem an unlikely occurrence, but it has happened before. At the end of the last Ice Age, for instance, vast shallow lakes were created by the melting of the polar ice cap. Eventually these lakes broke through their ice dams and poured off into the oceans. The Canadian shield still sports the scars from three or four of these cataclysmic floods; one flowed down the Mississippi, one the Hudson, one the St Lawrence.
These flows apparently stalled the world ocean conveyor belt current, and the climate of the whole world changed as a result, sometimes in as little as three years.
Now, would the Arctic sea ice, breaking into bergs and flowing south past Greenland, dump enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to stall the Gulf Stream again?
Frank Vanderwal kept track of climate news as a sort of morbid hobby. His friend Kenzo Hayakawa, an old climbing partner and grad school housemate, had spent time at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before coming to NSF to work with the weather crowd on the ninth floor, and so Frank occasionally checked in with him, to say hi and find out the latest. Things were getting wild out there; extreme weather events were touching down all over the world, the violent, short-termed ones almost daily, the chronic problem situations piling one on the next, so that never were they entirely clear of one or another of them. The Hyperniño, severe drought in India and Peru, lightning fires perpetual in Malaysia; then on the daily scale, a typhoon destroying most of Mindanao, a snap freeze killing crops and breaking pipes all over Texas, and so on. Something every day.
Like a lot of climatologists and other weather people Frank had met, Kenzo presented all this news with a faintly proprietarial air, as if he were curating the weather. He liked the wild stuff, and enjoyed sharing news of it, especially if it seemed to support his contention that the heat added anthropogenically to the atmosphere had been enough to change the Indian Ocean monsoon patterns for good, triggering global repercussions; this meant, in practice, almost everything that happened. This week for instance it was tornadoes, previously confined almost entirely to North America, as a kind of freak of that continent’s topography and latitude, but now appearing in east Africa and in central Asia. Last week it had been the weakening of the Great World Ocean Current in the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic.
‘Unbelievable,’ Frank would say.
‘I know. Isn’t it great?’
Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little room filled with file cabinets and copy machines informally called ‘The Department of Unfortunate Statistics’. Someone had started to tape on the beige walls of this room extra copies of pages that held interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.
The oldest ones were headlines, things like:
World Bank President Says Four Billion Live on Less Than Two Dollars a Day
or
America: Five Percent of World Population, Fifty Percent of Corporate Ownership
Later pages were charts, or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles of a quantitative nature out of the scientific literature.
When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was, looking at the latest. It was another headline:
352 Richest People Own As Much as the Poorest Two Billion, Says Canadian Food Project
‘I don’t think this can be right,’ Edgardo declared.
‘How so?’ Frank said.
‘Because the poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a big percentage of the world’s total capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to match the top three hundred and fifty.’
Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belabouring the obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up a brief quote, ‘72.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.’
Frank, wanting to bug her, said, ‘What do you think, Anna?’
‘About what?’
Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.
Anna said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three hundred.’
‘Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latest Forbes 500 reports?’
Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world generally. He tapped another taped-up page. ‘The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.’
Anna said, ‘I wonder how they define surplus value.’
‘Profit,’ Frank said.
Edgardo shook his head. ‘You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created beyond the pay for the labour, is still there.’
Anna said, ‘There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.’
‘Three weeks of vacation a year,’ Frank pointed out. ‘Pretty normal.’
‘Yeah, but that’s the average? What about all the part-time workers?’
‘There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.’
‘Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.’
‘You work overtime.’
‘Yeah but I don’t get paid for it.’
The men laughed at her.
‘They should have used the median,’ she said. ‘The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s …’ – Anna could do calculations in her head – ‘sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.’
‘What’s the average income?’ Edgardo asked. ‘Thirty thousand?’
‘Maybe less,’ Frank said.
‘We don’t have any idea,’ Anna objected.
‘Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?’
‘About ten? Or is it less?’
Edgardo said, ‘Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.’ He grinned at Frank and Anna. ‘How stupid is that?’
Anna shook her head. ‘People don’t see it that way.’
‘But here are the statistics!’
‘People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.’
‘They’re close enough for people to get the idea! But they are not taught to think! In fact they’re taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with.’
Even Frank was not willing to go this far. ‘It’s a matter of what you can see,’ he suggested. ‘You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.’
‘But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no one earns that much.’
‘The only things people understand are sensory,’ Frank insisted. ‘We’re hardwired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.’
‘That’s what I’m saying,’ Edgardo said cheerfully. ‘We are stupid!’
‘I’ve got to get back to it,’ Anna said, and left. It really wasn’t her kind of conversation.
Frank followed her out, and finally headed home. He drove his little fuel-cell Honda out along Old Dominion Parkway, already jammed; over the Beltway, and then up to a condo complex called Swink’s New Mill, where he had rented a condominium for his year at NSF.
He parked in the complex’s cellar garage and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. His apartment looked out towards the Potomac – a long view and a nice apartment, rented out for the year from a young State Department guy who was doing a stint in Brasilia. It was furnished in a stripped-down style that suggested the man did not live there very often. But a nice kitchen, functional spaces, everything easy, and most of the time Frank was home he was asleep anyway, so he didn’t care what it was like.
He had picked up one of the free papers back at work, and now as he spooned down some cottage cheese he looked again at the Personals section, a regrettable habit he had had for years, fascinated as he was by the glimpse these pages gave of a subworld of radically efflorescing sexual diversity – a subculture that had understood the implications of the removal of biological constraints in the techno-urban landscape, and were therefore able and willing to create a kind of polymorphous panmixia. Were these people really out there, or was this merely the collective fantasy life of a bunch of lonely souls like himself? He had never contacted any of the people putting in the ads to try to find out. He suspected the worst, and would rather be lonely. Although the sections devoted to people looking for LTRs, meaning ‘long-term relationships’, went far beyond the sexual fantasies, and sometimes struck him with force. ISO LTR: in search of long-term relationship. The species had long ago evolved towards monogamous relationships, they were wired into the brain’s structure, every culture manifesting the same overwhelming tendency toward pair bonding. Not a cultural imposition but a biological instinct. They might as well be storks in that regard.
And so he read the ads, but never replied. He was only here for a year; San Diego was his home. It made no sense to take any action on this particular front, no matter what he felt or read.
The ads themselves also tended to stop him.
Husband hunting, SWF, licensed nurse, seeks a hardworking, handsome SWM for LTR. Must be a dedicated Jehovah’s Witness.
SBM, 5’5”, shy, quiet, a little bit serious, seeking Woman, age open. Not good-looking or wealthy but Nice Guy. Enjoy foreign movies, opera, theater, music, books, quiet evenings.
These entries were not going to get a lot of responses. But they, like all the rest, were as clear as could be on the fundamental primate needs they were asking for. Frank could have written the urtext underneath them, and one time he had, and had even sent it in to a paper, as a joke of course, for all those reading these confessions with the same analytical slant he had – it would make them laugh. Although of course if any woman reading it liked the joke well enough to call, well, that would have been a sign.
Male homo sapiens desires company of female homo sapiens for mutual talk and grooming behavior, possibly mating and reproduction. Must be happy, run fast.