“Well I’ll be damned.”
He sat back, thinking it over. Taolini had liked Pierzinski’s proposal; she had rated it “Very Good,” and argued in favor of funding it, persuasively enough that at the time it had given him a little scare. She had seen its potential…
Then Kenzo called up, raving about the storm and the flood, and Frank joined everyone else in the building in watching the TV news and the NOAA website, trying to get a sense of how serious things were. It became clear that things were serious indeed when one channel showed Rock Creek overflowing its banks and running deep down the streets toward Foggy Bottom; then the screen shifted the image to Foggy Bottom, waist-deep everywhere, and then came images from the inundated-to-the-rooftops Southwest district, including the classically pillared War College Building at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia, sticking out of the water like a temple of Atlantis.
The Jefferson Memorial was much the same. Rain-lashed rooftop cameras all over the city transmitted more images of the flood, and Frank stared, fascinated; the city was a lake.
The climate guys on the ninth floor were already posting topographical map projections with the flood peaking at various heights. If the surge got to twenty feet above sea level at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia, which Kenzo thought was a reasonable projection given the tidal bore and all, the new shore along this contour line would run roughly from the Capitol up Pennsylvania Avenue to where it crossed Rock Creek. That meant the Capitol on its hill, and the White House on its lower rise, would probably both be spared; but everything to the south and west of them was underwater already, as the videos confirmed.
Upstream monitoring stations showed that the peak of the flood had not yet arrived.
“Everything has combined!” Kenzo exclaimed over the phone. “It’s all coming together!” His usual curatorial tone had shifted to that of an impresario—the Master of Disaster—or even to an almost parental pride. He was as excited as Frank had ever heard him.
“Could this be from the Atlantic stall?” Frank asked.
“Oh no, very doubtful. This is separate I think, a collisionary storm. Although the stall might bring more storms like this. Windier and colder. This is what that will be like!”
“Jesus…Can you tell me what’s going on on the Virginia side?” There would be no way to cross the Potomac until the storm was over. “Are people working anywhere around here?”
“They’re sandbagging down at Arlington Cemetery,” Kenzo said. “There’s video on channel 44. It’s got a call out for volunteers.”
“Really!”
Frank was off. He took the stairs to the basement, to be sure he didn’t get caught in an elevator, and drove his car up onto the street. It was awash in places, but only to a depth of a few inches. Possibly this would soon get worse; runoff wouldn’t work when the river was flowing back up the drainpipes. But for now he was okay to get to the river.
As he turned right and stopped for the light, he saw the Starbucks people out on the sidewalk, passing out bags of food and cups of coffee to the cars in front of him. Frank opened his window as one of them approached, and the employee passed in a bag of pastries, then handed him a paper cup of coffee.
“Thanks!” Frank shouted. “You guys should take over emergency services!”
“We already did. You go and get yourself out of here.” She waved him on.
Frank drove east toward the river, laughing as he downed the pastry. Like everyone else still on the road, he plowed through the water at about five miles an hour. Fire trucks passed through at a faster clip, leaving big wakes.
As he crossed one intersection Frank spotted a trio of men ducking behind a building, carrying something. Could there be looters? Would anyone really do it? How sad to think that there were people so stuck in always defect mode that they couldn’t get out of it, even when a chance came for everything to change. What a waste of an opportunity!
Eventually he came to a roadblock and parked, following the directions of a man in an orange vest. It was a moment of hard rain. In the distance he could see people passing sandbags down a line, just to the east of the U.S. Marines’ Memorial. He hustled over to join them.
From where he worked he could often see the Potomac, pouring down the Boundary Channel between the mainland and Columbia Island, tearing away the bridges and the marinas and threatening the low-lying parts of Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people were working around him, carrying small sandbags that looked like fifty-pound cement bags, and no doubt were about that heavy. Some big guys were lifting them off truck beds and passing them to people who passed them down lines, or carried them over shoulders, to near or far sections of a sandbag wall under the Virginia end of Memorial Bridge, where firemen were directing construction.
The noise of the river and the rain together made it hard to hear. People shouted to one another, sharing instructions and news. The airport was drowned, old Alexandria flooded, the Anacostia Valley filled for miles. The Mall a lake, of course.
Frank nodded at anything said his way, not bothering to understand, and worked like a dervish. It was very satisfying. He felt deeply happy, and looking around he could see that everyone else was happy too. That’s what happens, he thought, watching people carry limp sandbags like coolies out of an old Chinese painting. It takes something like this to free people to be always generous.
Late in the day he stood on their sandbag wall. It gave him a good view over the flood. The wind had died down, but the rain was falling almost as hard as ever. In some moments it seemed there was more water in the air than air.
His team had been given a break by a sudden end to the supply of sandbags. His back was stiff, and he stretched himself in circles, like the trunks of the trees had been doing all day. The wind had shifted frequently, and had included short hard blasts from the west or north, vicious slaps like microbursting downdrafts. But now there was some kind of aerial truce.
Then the rain too relented. It became a very light drizzle. Over the foamy water in the Boundary Channel he could now see far across the Potomac proper: a swirling brown plate, sheeting as far as he could see to the east. The Washington Monument was a dim obelisk on a watery horizon. The Lincoln Memorial and Kennedy Center were both islands in the stream. Black clouds formed a low ceiling above them, and between the two, water and cloud, he could feel the air being smashed this way and that. Despite the disorderly gusts he was still warm from his exertions, wet but warm, with only his hands and ears slightly nipped by the wind. He stood there flexing his spine, feeling the tired muscles of his lower back.
A powerboat growled slowly up the Boundary Channel below them. Frank watched it pass, wondering how shallow its draft was; it was twenty-five or maybe even thirty feet long, a rescue boat like a sleek cabin cruiser, hull painted a shade of green that made it almost invisible. The illuminated cockpit shed its light on a person standing upright at the stern, looking like one of the weird sisters in the movie Don’t Look Now.
This person looked over at the sandbag levee, and Frank saw that it was the woman from the elevator in Bethesda. Shocked, he put his hands to his mouth and shouted, “HEY!” as loud as he could, emptying his lungs all at once.
No sign in the roar of flood and rain that she had heard him. Nor did she appear to see him waving. As the boat began to disappear around a bend in the channel, Frank spotted white lettering on its stern—GCX88A—then it was gone. Its wake had already splashed the side of the levee and roiled away.
Frank pulled his phone out of his windbreaker pocket, shoved it in his ear, then tapped the button for NSF’s climate office. Luckily it was Kenzo who picked up. “Kenzo, it’s Frank—listen, write down this sequence, it’s very important, please? GCX88A, have you got that? Read it back. GCX88A. Great. Great. Wow. Okay, listen Kenzo, that’s a boat’s number, it was on the stern of a powerboat about twenty-six feet long. I couldn’t tell if it was public or private, I suspect public, but I need
to know whose it is. Can you find that out for me? I’m out in the rain and can’t see my phonepad well enough to Google it.”
“I can try,” Kenzo said. “Here, let me…well, it looks like the boat belongs to the marina on Roosevelt Island.”
“That would make sense. Is there a phone number for it?”
“Let’s see—that should be in the Coast Guard records. Wait, they’re not open files. Hold a minute, please.”
Kenzo loved these little problems. Frank waited, trying not to hold his breath. Another instinctive act. As he waited he tried to etch the woman’s face again on his mind, thinking he might be able to get a portrait program to draw something like what he was remembering. She had looked serious and remote, like one of the Fates.
“Yeah, Frank, here it is. Do you want me to call it and pass you along?”
“Yes please, but write it down for me too.”
“Okay, I’ll pass you over and get off. I have to get back to it here.”
“Thanks Kenzo, thanks a lot.”
Frank listened, sticking a finger in his other ear. There was a pause, a ring. The ring had a rapid pulse and an insistent edge, as if it were designed to compete with the sounds of an inboard engine on a boat. Three rings, four, five; if an answering machine message came on, what would he say?
“Hello?”
It was her voice.
“Hello?” she said again.
He had to say something or she would hang up.
“Hi,” he said. “Hi, this is me.”
There was a static-filled silence.
“We were stuck in that elevator together in Bethesda.”
“Oh my God.”
Another silence. Frank let her assimilate it. He had no idea what to say. It seemed like the ball was in her court, and yet as the silence went on, a fear grew in him.
“Don’t hang up,” he said, surprising himself. “I just saw your boat go by, I’m here on the levee at the back of the Davis Highway. I called information and got your boat’s number. I know you didn’t want—I mean, I tried to find you afterward, but I couldn’t, and I could tell that you didn’t—that you didn’t want to be found. So I figured I would leave it at that, I really did.”
He could hear himself lying and added hastily, “I didn’t want to, but I didn’t see what else I could do. So when I saw you just now, I called a friend who got me the boat’s number. I mean how could I not, when I saw you like that.”
“I know,” she said.
He breathed in. He felt himself filling up, his back straightening. Something in the way she said “I know” brought it all back again. The way she had made it a bond between them.
After a time he said, “I wanted to find you again. I thought that our time in the elevator, I thought it was…”
“I know.”
His skin warmed. It was like a kind of St. Elmo’s fire running over him, he’d never felt anything like it.
“But—” she said, and he learned another new feeling; dread clutched him under the ribs. He waited as for a blow to fall.
The silence went on. An isolated freshet of rain pelted down, cleared, and then he could see across the wind-lashed Potomac again. A huge rushing watery world, awesome and dreamlike.
“Give me your number,” her voice said in his ear.
“What?”
“Give me your phone number,” she said again.
He gave her his number, then added, “My name is Frank Vanderwal.”
“Frank Vanderwal,” she said, then repeated the number.
“That’s it.”
“Now give me some time,” she said. “I don’t know how long.” And the connection went dead.
* * *
The second day of the storm passed as a kind of suspended moment, everything continuing as it had the day before, everyone in the area living through it, enduring, waiting for conditions to change. The rain was not as torrential, but so much of it had fallen in the previous twenty-four hours that it was still sheeting off the land into the flooded areas and keeping them flooded. The clouds continued to crash together overhead, and the tides were still higher than normal, so that the whole Piedmont region surrounding Chesapeake Bay was inundated. Except for immediate acts of a lifesaving nature, nothing could be done except to endure. All transport was drowned. The phones remained down, and power losses left hundreds of thousands without electricity. Escapes from drowning took precedence even over journalism (almost), and even though reporters from all over the world were converging on the capital to report on this most spectacular story—the capital of the hyperpower, drowned and smashed—most of them could only get as close as the edges of the storm, or the flood; inside that it was an ongoing state of emergency, and everyone was involved with rescues, relocations, and escapes of various kinds. The National Guard was out, all helicopters were enlisted into the effort; the video and digital imagery generated for the world to see was still incidental to other things; that in itself meant ordinary law had been suspended, and there was pressure to bring things back to all-spectacle all-the-time. Part of the National Guard found itself posted on the roads outside the region, to keep people from flooding the area as the water had.
Very early on the second morning it became evident that while most areas had seen high water already, the flooding of Rock Creek had not yet crested. That night its headwaters had received the brunt of one of the hardest downpours of the storm, and the already saturated land could only shed this new rainfall into the streambed. The creek’s drop to the Tidal Basin was precipitous in some places, and for most of its length the creek ran at the bottom of a narrow gorge carved into the higher ground of Northwest District. There was nowhere to hold an excess flow.
All this meant big trouble for the National Zoo, which was located on a sort of peninsula created by three turns in Rock Creek, and therefore directly overlooking the gorge. After the hard downpour in the night, the staff of the zoo congregated in the main offices to discuss the situation.
They had some visiting dignitaries on hand, who had been forced to spend the previous night there; several members of the embassy of the nation of Khembalung had come to the zoo the morning before, to take part in a ceremony welcoming two Bengal tigers brought from their country to the zoo. The storm had made it impossible for them to return to Virginia, but they had seemed happy to spend the night at the zoo, concerned as they were about their tigers, and the other animals as well.
Now they all watched together as one of the office’s computers showed images of Rock Creek’s gorge walls being torn away and washed downstream. Floating trees were catching in drifts against bridges over the creek, forming temporary impediments that forced water out into the flanking neighborhoods, until the bridges blew like failed dams, and powerful low walls of debris-laden water tore down the gorge harder than ever, ripping it away even more brutally. The eastern border of the zoo made it obvious how this endangered them: the light brown torrent was ripping around the park, just a few feet below the lowest levels of the zoo grounds. That plus the images on their computers made it ever more clear that the zoo was very likely to be overwhelmed, and soon. It looked like it was going to turn into something like a reversal of Noah’s flood, becoming one in which the people mostly survived, but two of every species were drowned.
The Khembali legation urged the National Park staffers to evacuate the zoo as quickly as possible. The time and vehicles necessary for a proper evacuation were completely lacking, of course, as the superintendent quickly pointed out, but the Khembalis replied that by evacuation they meant opening all the cages and letting the animals escape. The zookeepers were skeptical, but the Khembalis turned out to be experts in flood response, well-acquainted with the routines required in such situations. They quickly called up photos of the zookeepers of Prague, weeping by the bodies of their drowned elephants, to show what could happen if drastic measures were not taken. They then called up the Global Disaster Information Network, which had a complete protocol for this very s
cenario (threatened zoos), along with real-time satellite photos and flood data. It turned out that released animals did not roam far, seldom threatened humans (who were usually locked into buildings anyway), and were easy to re-collect when the waters subsided. And the data showed Rock Creek was certain to rise further.
This prediction was easy to believe, given the roaring brown water bordering most of the zoo, and almost topping the gorge. The animals certainly believed it, and were calling loudly for freedom. Elephants trumpeted, monkeys screamed, the big cats roared and growled. Every living creature, animal and human both, was terrified by this cacophony. The din was terrific, beyond anything any jungle movie had dared. Panic was in the air.
Connecticut Avenue now resembled something like George Washington’s canal at Great Falls: a smooth narrow run of water, paralleling a wild torrent. All the side streets were flooded as well. Nowhere was the water very high, however—usually under a foot—and so the superintendent, looking amazed to hear himself, said “Okay let’s let them out. Cages first, then the enclosures. Work from the gate down to the lower end of the park. Come on—there’s a lot of locks to unlock.”
In the dark rainy air, beside the roaring engorged creek, the staff and their visitors ventured out and began unlocking the animals. They drove them toward Connecticut when necessary, though most animals needed no urging at all, but bolted for the gates with a sure sense of the way out. Some however huddled in their enclosures or cages, and could not be coaxed out. There was no time to spare for any particular cage; if the animals refused to leave, the zookeepers moved on and hoped there would be time to return.
The tapirs and deer were easy. They kept the biggest aviaries closed, feeling they would not flood to their tops. Then the zebras, and after them the cheetahs, the Australian creatures, kangaroos bounding with great splashes; the pandas trundling methodically out in a group, as if they had planned this for years. Elephants on parade; giraffes; hippos and rhinos, beavers and otters; after some consultation, and the coaxing of the biggest cats into their moving trucks, the pumas and smaller cats; then bison, wolves, camels; the seals and sea lions; bears; the gibbons all in a troop, screaming with triumph; the single black jaguar slipping dangerously into the murk; the reptiles, the Amazonian creatures already looking right at home; the prairie dog town, the drawbridge dropped to Monkey Island, causing another stampede of panicked primates; the gorillas and apes following more slowly. Now washes of brown water were spilling over the north end of the park and running swiftly down the zoo’s paths, and the lower end of the zoo was submerged by the brown flow. Very few animals continued to stay in their enclosures, and even fewer headed by mistake toward the creek; the roar was simply too frightening, the message too obvious. Every living thing’s instincts were clear on where safety lay.
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