not think much of it. But everyone needed a set of operating procedures to navigate the day. A totalizing theory forming the justification for a rubric for the daily decisions. The science of that particular Wednesday. Using flawed equipment (the brain, civilization) to optimize results. Most adaptive practices. Robustness.
Something from ecology, from Aldo Leopold: What’s good is what’s good for the land.
Something from Rudra (although he said from the Dalai Lama, or the Buddha): Try to do good for other people. Your happiness lies there.
Try it and see. Make the experiment and analyze it. Try again. Act on your desires.
So what do you really want?
And can you really decide?
One day when Frank woke up in the garden shed with Rudra, it took him a while to remember where he was – long enough that when he sat up he was actively relieved to be Frank Vanderwal, or anybody.
Then he had trouble figuring out which pants to put on, something he had never considered before in his life; and then he realized he did not want to go to work, although he had to. Was this unusual? He wasn’t sure.
As he munched on a power bar and waited for his bedside coffee machine to provide, he clicked on his laptop, and after the portentous chord announced the beginning of his cyber-day, he went to emersonfortheday.net.
‘Hey, Rudra, are you awake?’
‘Always.’
‘Listen to this. It’s Emerson, talking about our parcellated mind theory:
“It is the largest part of a man that is not inventoried. He has many enumerable parts: he is social, professional, political, sectarian, literary, and is this or that set and corporation. But after the most exhausting census has been made, there remains as much more which no tongue can tell. And this remainder is that which interests. Far the best part of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed, before him. This dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future, is his possibility.”’
‘Maybe so,’ Rudra said. ‘But whole sight is good too. Being one.’
‘But isn’t it interesting he talks about it in the same terms.’
‘It is common knowledge. Anyone knows that.’
‘I guess. I think Emerson knows a lot of things I don’t know.’
He was a man who had spent time in the forest, too. Frank liked to see the signs of this: ‘The man who rambles in the woods seems to be the first man that ever entered a grove, his sensations and his world are so novel and strange.’ That was right; Frank knew that feeling. Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal – Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. ‘Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o’clock; cold and shabby at six.’ The quick strangeness of the world, how it came on you all of a sudden – now, for Frank, the feeling started on waking in the morning. Coming up blank, the primal man, the first man ever to wake. Strange indeed, not to know who or what you were.
Often these days he felt he should be moving back out into the park, and living in his treehouse. That would mean leaving the Khembalis, however, and that was bad. But on the other hand, it would in some ways be a relief. He had been living with them for almost a year now, hard to believe but it was true, and they were so crowded. They could use all the extra space they could get. Besides, it felt like time to get back outdoors and into the wind again. Spring was coming, spring and all.
But there was Rudra to consider. As his roommate, Frank was part of his care. He was old, frail, sleeping a lot. Frank was his companion and his friend, his English teacher and his Tibetan student. Moving out would inevitably disrupt that situation.
He read on for a while, then realized he was hungry, and that in poking around and thinking about Emerson and Thoreau, and cognitive blind spots, he had been reading for over an hour. Rudra had gotten up and slipped out. ‘Aack!’ Time to get up! Seize the day!
Up and out then. Another day. He had to consult with Edgardo about the Caroline situation. Best get something to eat first. But – from where?
He couldn’t decide.
A minute or two later, angrily, and before even actually getting up, he grabbed his cell phone and made the call. He called his doctor’s office, and found that, regarding a question like this, the doctor couldn’t see him for a week.
That was fine with Frank. He had made the decision and made the call. Caroline would have no reason to reproach him, and he could go back to the way things were. Not that something didn’t have to be done. It was getting ridiculous. It was a – an obstacle. A disability. An injury, not just to his brain, but to his thinking.
That very afternoon, the urgency in him about Caroline being so sharp and recurrent, he made arrangements to go out on a run with Edgardo. It was an afternoon so cold that no one but Kenzo would have gone out with them, and he was away at a conference, so after they cleared themselves with the wands (which Frank now questioned as fully reliable indicators), off they went.
The two of them ran side by side through the streets of Arlington, bundled up in nearly Arctic running gear, their heavy wool caps rolled up just far enough to expose their ears’ bottom halves, which allowed sound into the eardrums so they could hear each other over the noise of traffic without shouting or completely freezing their ears. Very soon they would be moving with Diane over to the Old Executive Offices, right next door to the White House; this would be one of their last runs on this route. But it was such a lame route that neither would miss it.
Frank explained what had happened in Maine, in short rhythmic phrases synchronized with his stride. It was such a relief to be able to tell somebody about it. Almost a physical relief. One vented, as they said.
‘So how the heck did they follow me?’ he demanded at the end of his tale. ‘I thought your friend said I was clean.’
‘He thought you were,’ Edgardo said. ‘And it isn’t certain you were followed. It could have been a coincidence.’
Frank shook his head.
‘Well, there may be other ways you are chipped, or they may indeed have just followed you physically. We’ll work on that, but the question now becomes what has she done.’
‘She said she has a Plan C that no one can trace. And she said it would get her down in this area. That she’d get in touch with me. I don’t know how that will work. Anyway now I’m wondering if we can, you know, root these guys out. Maybe sic the president on them.’
‘Well,’ Edgardo said, elongating the word for about a hundred yards. ‘These kinds of black operations are designed to be insulated, you know. To keep those above from responsibility for them.’
‘But surely if there was a problem, if you really tried to hunt things down from above? Following the money trail, for instance?’
‘Maybe. Black budgets are everywhere. Have you asked Charlie?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe you should, if you feel comfortable doing that. Phil Chase has a million things on his plate. It might take someone like Charlie to get his attention.’
Frank nodded. ‘Well, whatever happens, we need to stop those guys.’
‘We?’
‘I mean, they need to be stopped. And no one else is doing it. And, I don’t know – maybe you and your friends from your DARPA days, or wherever, might be able to make a start. You’ve already made the start, I mean, and could carry it forward from there.’
‘Well,’ Edgardo said. ‘I shouldn’t speak to that.’
Frank focused on the run. They were down to