Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Meanwhile, out of sight, out of mind. They were off the grid, they had slung their hooks, they had lit out for the territory. The firelight bounced on their worn faces, etching each knock and crease. Little more of them could be seen, making it seem like a circle of disembodied faces—masks again—or a Rockwell Kent woodblock.

  “There was this guy living on the streets in San Francisco who turned out was like totally rich, he was heir to a fortune but he just liked living outdoors.”

  “But he was a drunk too, right?”

  “Fucking George Carlin is so funny.”

  “They said I was grade ten but they wouldn’t give me dental.”

  Blah blah blah. Frank recalled a fire from his youth: two climber gals slightly buzzed had come bombing into Camp Four around midnight and hauled him away from a dying fire, insisting that he join them in a midnight swim in the Merced River, and who could say no to that. Though it was shocking cold water and pitch black to boot, more a good idea than a comfortable reality, swimming with two naked California women in the Yosemite night. But then when they got out and staggered back to the fire, near dead from hypothermia, it had been necessary to pile on wood until it was a leaping yellow blaze and dance before it to catch every pulse of lifesaving heat. Even at the time Frank had understood that he would never see anything more beautiful.

  Now he sat with a bunch of red-faced homeless guys bundled in their greasy down jackets, around a fire hidden at the bottom of a trashcan. The contrast with the night at Camp Four was so complete that it made him laugh. It made the two nights part of the same thing somehow.

  “We should build a real fire,” he said.

  No one moved. Ashes rose on the smoke from the trashcan. Frank reached in with a two-by-four and tried to stir it up enough to give them some flame over the rim. “If you have a fire but you can’t see it,” he said as he jabbed, “then you go out of your mind.”

  Fedpage snorted. “Central heating, right?”

  “So everyone’s crazy, yarr. Of course they are.”

  “We certainly are.”

  “Is that what did it hey?”

  “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

  “When did someone first say that, a million years ago? Oooop! Ooop! Oooop!”

  “Hey there monkey man, quit that now! You sound like Meg Ryan in that movie.”

  “Ha ha haaaa! That was so fucking funny.”

  “She was faking it! She was faking it.”

  “I’ll take it fake or not.”

  “As if you could tell!”

  “—greatest human vocalization ever recorded.”

  “Yeah right, you obviously don’t know your porn.”

  Things that would warm a body: laughter; re-enacting fights; playing air guitar; playing with fire; talking about sex; thinking about climber gals.

  Knocking a stone oven apart would definitely warm the body. Frank got up. What he needed was a sledgehammer and a crowbar; what they had were some lengths of two-by-four and an old aluminum baseball bat, already much dented.

  One stone in the little opening at the top was loose in its cement. Frank moved to what looked like the right angle and smashed the stone with a two-by-four. The bros were pleased at the diversion, they guffawed and urged him on. He knocked the first stone down into the firepit, reached into the ashes and rolled it out. After that it was a matter of knocking loose one stone at a time. He used the longest two-by-four and pounded away. The cement was old, and stone by stone the firepit came down.

  When he had gotten it down to knee height it made a sensible firepit, with a gap in one side where the old doorway had been. He filled the gap with stones. There were enough left over to make another firepit if they wanted one. Or maybe bench supports, if they found some planks.

  “Okay, let’s move the trashcan fire into the pit,” he said.

  “How you gonna pick it up? That can is red hot down there at the bottom, don’t you pick that up!”

  “You’ll burn your fucking hands off man!”

  “It’s not red hot,” Frank pointed out. “Let’s a couple of us grab it around the top. Wear gloves and tilt it, and we’ll lift the bottom with the studs here.”

  “Roll and burn your fucking leg off!”

  “Yeah right!”

  But Zeno was willing to do it, and so the rest gathered round. The ones who had gloves grasped the rim, lifted and tilted. Frank and Andy wedged studs under the bottom from opposite sides and lifted it up. With a whoosh the whole fiery mass sparked into the new ring and blasted up into the night. Howls chased the uprush of smoke and sparks.

  They sat around the cheery blaze, suddenly much more visible to each other.

  “Now we need a pizza!”

  “Who’ll get a pizza?”

  They all looked at Frank. “Ah shit,” he said. “Where’s Cutter?”

  “Get some beer too!” Zeno said, with the same fake laugh as before.

  Kicking through piles of fallen leaves, the cold air struck him like a splash of water in the face. It felt good. He had to laugh: all his life he had traveled to the mountains and the polar regions to breathe air this bracing and heady, and here it was, right now in the middle of this ridiculous city. Maybe the seasons would become his terrain now, and winter would be like high altitude or high latitude. It could be good.

  The afternoon before he and Diane were going to leave for New York, he phoned Spencer to see when they were playing, because he wanted to get one more game in before he left town.

  It was a perfect October day, Indian summer, and in the amber horizontal light of sunset they threw across a stiff western breeze that brought a continuous rain of yellow and brown leaves spinnerdrifting down on them. Frank slung his disk through the forest’s tickertape parade, hooting with all the rest, and he was deep in the game when they ran into the bros’ little clearing.

  Spencer stopped so abruptly that Frank almost rammed into him, thinking aurochs, but then he saw half a dozen men wearing flak jackets, aiming big assault rifles at the astonished bros.

  “Get down on the ground!” one of the men shouted. “Get down right now! GET DOWN.”

  The guys dropped awkwardly, faces on the ground, arms out to the side.

  The frisbee players stayed frozen in place. One of the men turned and said to them, “We’ll be just a minute more here. Why don’t you be on your way.”

  Frank and the frisbee guys nodded and took off down Ross, jogging until they were around the corner, then stopping and looking back.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  “A bust.”

  “Yeah but who?”

  “We’ll find out on the way back.”

  They played on, distracted, missing shot after shot. On the way back they hurried the pace, and came into site 21 huffing.

  The guys were still there, sitting around—all but Jory.

  “Hey guys what was that all about?” Spencer cried as they ran in. “That looked horrible!”

  “They rousted us,” Zeno said.

  Redbeard shook his head resentfully. “They made us lie down on the ground like we were criminals.”

  “They didn’t want any trouble,” said Zeno. “They thought Jory might be carrying.”

  Ah ha. Jory, the only one who had ever made Frank feel seriously uncomfortable. So it had not been a misreading.

  “They were ready to shoot us,” Redbeard complained.

  “Sure they were. They probably heard Jory had a gun.”

  “So it was Jory they were after?” Spencer said. “What did he do?”

  “Jory’s the one who beat up on Ralph! Don’t you know?”

  “No.”

  “Yes you do, it was in the papers. Ralph got pounded by Jory and a guy, down at 18.”

  “We had to pull him right off the guy, yeah! I had to peel his fingers right off of his neck! He was pounding his head right against the concrete.”

  “Yeah, so Ralph was in the hospital after that, but then a couple weeks later Jory s
howed up again and started hanging out with us like nothing had happened.”

  “Jesus,” Frank said. “Why didn’t you go to the police and get rid of this guy?”

  They shouted “YEAH RIGHT” at him in unison. Then, interrupting each other in their eagerness:

  “What do you think they’re going to do?”

  “They’ll call in and find out about my outstandings and get my parole officer—”

  “Fuck that, they’ll beat on you—”

  “You could end up put away for fucking years.”

  Zeno’s grin was sharklike. “Some things you just gotta live with, Doctor. The police are not there for us. Assholes come to hang with us, that’s just the way it is.”

  “Hard to believe,” Frank said.

  “Is it?”

  On they ran, and after they had finished their frisbee, Frank asked Spencer about it. “So they can’t get help from the police if they need it?”

  Spencer shook his head. “We can’t either, for that matter. People without a legal place of residence are kind of outside the legal system. It’s very property-based.”

  “Don’t you guys have places to live?”

  Spencer, Robin, and Robert laughed.

  “We do have places to live,” Spencer said, “but we don’t pay for them.”

  “What do you do then?”

  “We wander a bit. Just like you, right? We hunt and gather in the technosurround.”

  “A godly state,” Robin said.

  “Come to dinner and see,” Spencer offered. “The fregans in Klingle Valley are having a potluck.”

  “I don’t have anything to bring.”

  “Don’t worry. There’ll be enough. Maybe you can buy a bottle of wine on the way over.”

  On the walk through the park to Klingle Valley, one of the park tributaries of Rock Creek, Spencer and the others explained to Frank that they were ferals.

  “You use that word?”

  Yes, that’s what they usually called their mode these days, but also squatters, scavengers, fregans. There were ferals living in every city. It was a kind of urban wilderness thing.

  “Fregan, what’s that?”

  “It’s like vegan, only they’ll only eat food that they’ve gotten for free.”

  “Say what?”

  “They eat out of dumpsters and such. Scavenge food that is going to waste.”

  “Whoah.”

  “Think about how many restaurants there are in D.C.,” said Spencer. So many fine restaurants, so much wonderful food, and a certain percentage of it thrown away every night. Perfectly good fresh food. That was just the way the restaurant business had to run. So, if you knew the routine at these dumpsters, and you resolved never to spend money on food, but always either to grow it or scavenge it—or kill it, in the case of the many white-tailed deer being culled and eaten—then you were a fregan. They were going to a fregan potluck that very night. There would be lots of venison.

  The house hosting the potluck was boarded up, having been badly damaged in a fire. They slipped in the back to find a party going on, a whole bunch of people, young and not so young, some tattooed and pierced, others tie-dyed and rastafied. There was a fire in the fireplace, but the flue wasn’t drawing well; added to this smokiness was a funky mix of wet dog, patchouli, potluck food, and whatever was burning in a hookah in the corner: a mix of hash, cigars, and clove cigarettes, judging by the cloud Frank walked through.

  The frisbee players were greeted warmly, and Spencer was acclaimed as some kind of local celebrity, a gypsy king. He introduced Frank very informally, and hustled him through to the food table—”always wisest to get it while you can”— and they feasted on a selection of Washington restauranteering’s finest, slightly reconstituted for the occasion: steaks, quiche, salad, bread. Spencer ate like a wolf, and by the time they were done Frank was stuffed as well.

  “See?” Spencer said as they sat on the floor watching the crowd flow by. “There are lots of empty buildings in this city. If you work as a team and spend your time taking care of business, then you can find shelter and food for free. Scavenge clothes or buy in thrift shops, talk with people or play frisbee for fun, walk wherever you go—you can step outside the money economy almost entirely. Live off the excess, so you don’t add to the waste. You reduce waste, you pour energy back into the grid. Do a little street theater down in the lawyer district to gather some change, even do day labor or take a job in one of the shops. You don’t actually need money at all, although a little bit helps.”

  “Wow,” Frank said. “And about how many people are doing this?”

  “It’s hard to tell. It’s best to stay under the radar, because of just the sort of police issues you were asking the bros about. I think there’s several hundred people at least, maybe a thousand, who think of themselves as fregans or ferals. Obviously there are a lot more homeless people than that, but I’m talking about the people going at it like we are.”

  “Wow.”

  “How you think about what you’re doing makes a huge difference.”

  “That’s true.”

  A group in the corner was preparing to play some music: two guitars, mandolin, fiddle, wooden flute, a Bombay harmonium. Two young women came over to haul Spencer to his feet; a command performance, he was needed on percussion.

  Frank said, “Thanks Spencer, I’m going to have to go soon.”

  “That’s all right man, there’ll be more of these. Frisbee tomorrow?”

  “No, I’ve got to go to New York. I’ll check in when I get back.”

  “See you then.”

  FRANK AND DIANE TOOK THE TRAIN to New York. They sat facing each other over a table on the morning express from Union Station to Penn Station, rocking slightly as they worked on their laptops, stopping from time to time to sip their coffees and look out the window and talk. Sometimes this lasted half an hour, then they returned to work. It was companionable.

  Out the window flashed the backs of long row houses, tawdry unkempt yards. Old industrial buildings of the Mid-Atlantic states, rusty and broken-windowed, flying by click-click-click, sway sway, gone. Over one of the great rivers, then by the gray Atlantic, mumbling its dirty whitecaps onshore.

  Then descending underground, to go under the Hudson and enter Metropolis, just like Fritz Lang pictured it. Dark ancient brick walls, unmarked by any graffiti.

  The train stopped in midtunnel.

  “Did you ever live in New York?” Diane asked.

  “No. I’ve hardly even visited.”

  “Wow.”

  “You lived here?”

  “Yes, I went to Columbia.”

  “What for?”

  “Med school.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, a long time ago.”

  “Did you practice medicine?”

  “Sure. Five years, but then I got into research, and then administration, and that just kept going, I guess you’d say.”

  “Yes, I would,” peering at her laptop screensaver, which cycled a succession of Asian-American faces. “I mean, director of NSF—that’s administration all right.”

  She sighed. “It’s true. Things just kept on happening.”

  She tapped a button and made the faces go away. Replacing them was her calendar, every hour and half hour obviously accounted for. Under it was a spreadsheet of projects, a kind of Things To Do list, but with events categorized and broken down by background reading, premeetings, biographies of participants, and so on.

  “You must have a system too,” she noted, seeing him looking at it.

  “Sure,” Frank said. “A Things To Do list.”

  “That sounds healthier than this. So, are you enjoying yourself?”

  “Well, I suppose I am.”

  She laughed. “More than last year anyway, I hope?”

  He felt himself blushing. “Yeah, sure. It’s more of a challenge, of course. But I asked for it.” He gulped at that topic, and said quickly, “I’ll be a lot happier if the UN goes f
or one of these projects.”

  “Sure. But the work itself, in the building?”

  “Yeah, sure. More variety.”

  “It still isn’t research.”

  “I know. But I’m trying. Maybe it’s a different kind. I don’t know. I’ve never been too sure what we’re up to at NSF.”

  “I know.”

  His face was fully hot now. He thought: Come on, don’t be chicken here; if ever there was a chance to talk about this, it’s here and now. Only a few short months before, Diane had taken Frank’s angry critique of NSF and

  1. pretended she had never seen it,

  2. asked him to give a presentation on its contents to the NSF Science Board, and

  3. asked him publicly to stay on at NSF and chair a committee to study his suggestions, and all other possible methods for increasing NSF’s impact on the global warming situation—thus, in front of his ostensible peer group, making him prove that he was not a blowhard by taking on a hard thankless job for the good of all.

  And he had agreed to do it.

  So he took a deep breath, and said, “Why didn’t you say anything when I gave you that letter?”

  She pursed her lips. “I thought I did.”

  “Yes,” he tried not to be irritated, “but you know what I mean.”

  She nodded, looked down and tapped a note into her schedule. “It read to me like someone who was burnt out on doing jackets, and wanted to be doing something else. NSF itself didn’t really seem to be what you were talking about, not to me.”