Sixty Days and Counting

‘I can’t live with it if he’s trying to harm her, and there’s a good chance of him finding her.’

‘I know.’

‘I’ll have to go find her first.’

Edgardo nodded, looking at him with an evaluative expression. ‘Maybe so.’

At the Quiblers’ house in Bethesda this unsettled winter, things were busier than ever. This was mainly because of Phil Chase’s election, which of course had galvanized his Senatorial office, turning his staff into one part of a much larger transition team.

A presidential transition was a major thing, and there were famous cases of failed transitions by earlier administrations that were enough to put a spur to their rears, reminding them of the dire consequences that ineptitude in this area could have on the subsequent fates of the presidents involved. It was important to make a good running start, to craft the kind of ‘first hundred days’ that had energized the incoming administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, setting the model for most presidents since to try to emulate. Critical appointments had to be made, bold new programs turned into law.

Phil was well aware of this challenge and its history, and was determined to meet it successfully. ‘We’ll call it the First Sixty Days,’ he said to his staff. ‘Because there’s no time to lose!’ He had not slowed down after the election; indeed it seemed to Charlie Quibler that he had even stepped up the pace, if that were possible. Ignoring the claim of irregularities in the Oregon vote – claims which had become standard in any case ever since the tainted elections at the beginning of the century – and secure in the knowledge that the American public did not like to think about troubling news of this sort no matter who won, Phil was free to forge ahead with a nonstop schedule of meetings, meetings from dawn till midnight, and often long past it. He was lucky he was one of those people who only needed a few hours of sleep a day to get by.

Not so Charlie, who was jolted out of sleep far too often by calls from his colleague Roy Anastopholous, Phil’s new chief of staff, asking him to come down to the office and pitch in.

‘Roy, I can’t,’ Charlie would say. ‘I’ve got Joe here, Anna’s off to work already, and we’ve got Gymboree.’

‘Gymboree? Am I hearing this? Charlie which is more important to the fate of the Republic, advising the President or going to Gymboree?’

‘False choice,’ Charlie would snap. ‘Although Gymboree is far more important if we want Joe to sleep well at night, which we do. You’re talking to me now, right? That’s what telephones are for. How would this change in any way if I were down there?’

‘Yeah yeah yeah yeah, hey Chucker I gotta go now, but listen you have to come in from the cold, this is no time to be baby-sitting, we’ve got the fate of the world in the balance and we need you in the office and taking one of these crucial jobs that no one else can fill as well as you can. Joe is around two right? So you can put him in the daycare down here at the White House, or anywhere else in the greater metropolitan region for that matter, but you have to be here or else you will have missed the train, Phil isn’t going to stand for someone phoning home like E.T., lost somewhere in Bethesda when the world is sinking and freezing and drowning and burning up and everything else all at once.’

‘Roy. Stop. I am talking to you like once an hour, maybe more. I couldn’t talk to you more if we were handcuffed together.’

‘Yeah it’s nice it’s sweet it’s one of the treasured parts of my day, but it’s a face business, you know that, and I haven’t seen you in months, and Phil hasn’t either, and I’m afraid it’s getting to be a case of not seen not heard.’

‘Are you establishing a climate change task force?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to ask Diane Chang to be the science advisor?’

‘Yes. He already did.’

‘And are you going to convene a meeting with all the reinsurance companies?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re proposing the legislative package to the Congress?’

This was Charlie’s big omnibus environmental bill, brought back – in theory – from death by dismemberment.

‘Of course we are.’

‘So how exactly am I being cut out? That’s every single thing I’ve ever suggested to you.’

‘But Charlie, I’m looking forward, to how you will be cut out. You’ve gotta put Joe in daycare and come in out of the cold.’

‘But I don’t want to.’

‘I gotta go you get a grip and get down here bye.’

He sounded truly annoyed. But Charlie could speak his mind with Roy, and he wasn’t going to let the election change that. And when he woke up in the morning, and considered that he could either go down to the Mall and talk policy with policy wonks all day, and get home late every night – or he could spend that day with Joe wandering the parks and bookstores of Bethesda, calling in to Phil’s office from time to time to have those same policy talks in mercifully truncated form, he knew very well which day he preferred. It was an easy call, a no-brainer. He liked spending time with Joe. With all its problems and crises, he enjoyed it more than almost anything he had ever done. And Joe was growing up fast, and Charlie could see that what he enjoyed most in their life together was only going to last until preschool, if then. It went by fast!

Indeed, in the last week or so it seemed that Joe was changing so fast that Charlie’s desire to spend time with him was becoming as much a result of worry as of desire for pleasure. It seemed he was dealing with a different kid. But Charlie suppressed this feeling, and tried to pretend to himself that it was only for positive reasons that he wanted to stay home.

Only occasionally, and for short periods, could he think honestly about this to himself. Nothing about the matter was obvious, even when he did try to think about it. Because ever since their trip to Khembalung, Joe had been a little different – feverish, Anna claimed, although only her closest ovulation-monitoring thermometer could find this fever – but in any case hectic, and irritable in a way that was unlike his earlier irritability, which had seemed to Charlie a kind of cosmic energy, a force chafing at its restraints. After Khembalung it had turned peevish, even pained.

All this had coincided with what Charlie regarded as undue interest in Joe on the part of the Khembalis, and Charlie had gotten Drepung to admit that the Khembalis thought that Joe was one of their great lamas, reincarnated in Joe’s body. That’s how it happened, to their way of thinking.

After that news, and also at Charlie’s insistence, they had performed a kind of exorcism ritual (they had not put it like that) designed to drive any reincarnated soul out of Joe, leaving the original inhabitant, which was the only one Charlie wanted in there. But now he was beginning to wonder if all that had been a good idea. Maybe, he was beginning to think, his original Joe had in fact been the very personality that the Khembalis had driven out.

Not that Joe was all that different. Anna declared his fever was gone, and he was therefore more relaxed, and that his moodiness was much as before.

Only to Charlie he was clearly different, in ways he found hard to characterize to himself – but chiefly, the boy was now too content with things as they were. His Joe had never been like that, not since the very moment of his birth, which from all appearances had angered him greatly. Charlie could still remember seeing his little red face just out of Anna, royally pissed off and yelling.

But none of that now. No tantrums, no imperious commands. He was calm, he was biddable; he was even inclined to take naps. It just wasn’t his Joe.

Given these new impressions, Charlie was not in the slightest inclined to want to put Joe in a new situation, thus confusing the issue even further. He wanted to hang out with him, see what he was doing and feeling; he wanted to study him. This was what parental love came down to, apparently, sometimes, especially with a toddler, a human being in one of the most transient and astonishing of all the life stages. Someone coming to consciousness!

But the world was no respecter of Charlie’s feelings. Later that morning his cell phone rang again, and this time it was Phil Chase himself.

‘Charlie, how are you?’

‘I’m fine, Phil, how are you? Are you getting any rest?’

‘Oh yeah sure. I’m still on my post-campaign vacation, so things are very relaxed.’

‘Uh huh, sure. That’s not what Roy tells me. How’s the transition coming?’

‘It’s coming fine, as I understand it. I thought that was your bailiwick.’

Charlie laughed with a sinking feeling. Already he felt the change in Phil’s status begin to weigh on him, making the conversation seem more and more surreal. He had worked for Phil for a long time, but always while Phil had been a senator; Charlie had long since gotten used to the considerable and yet highly circumscribed power that Phil as senator had wielded. It had become normalized, indeed had become kind of a running joke between them, in that Charlie often had reminded Phil just how completely circumscribed his power was.

Now that just wasn’t going to work. The president of the United States might be many things, but un-powerful was not among them. Many of the administrations preceding Phil’s had worked very hard to expand the powers of the executive branch beyond what the constitutional framers had intended – which campaigns made a mockery of the ‘strict constitutionalist’ talk put out by these same people when discussing what principles the Supreme Court’s justices should hold, and showed they preferred a secretive executive dictatorship to democracy, especially if the president were a puppet installed by the interested parties. But never mind; the result of their labors was an apparatus of power that if properly understood and utilized could in many ways rule the world. Bizarre but true: the president of the United States could rule the world, both by direct fiat and by setting the agenda that everyone else had to follow or be damned. World ruler. Not really, of course, but it was about as close as anyone could get. And how exactly did you joke about that?

‘Your clothes are still visible?’ Charlie inquired, oppressed by these thoughts.

‘To me they are. But look,’ passing on a full riposte, as being understood in advance – although Phil could no doubt see the comedy of omnipotence as well as the comedy of constraint – ‘I wanted to talk to you about your position in the administration. Roy says you’re being a little balky, but obviously we need you.’

‘I’m here already. I can talk twelve hours a day, if you like.’

‘Well, but a lot of these jobs require more than that. They’re in-person jobs, as you know.’

‘What do you mean, like which ones?’

‘Well, like for instance head of the EPA.’

‘WHAT?’ Charlie shouted. He reeled, literally, in that he staggered slightly to the side, then listed back to catch himself. ‘Don’t you be scaring me, Phil! I hope you’re not thinking of making appointments as stupid as that! Jesus, you know perfectly well I’m not qualified for that job! You need a first-rate scientist for that one, a major researcher with some policy and administrative experience, we’ve talked about this already! Every agency needs to feel appreciated and supported to keep esprit de corps and function at the highest levels, you know that! Isn’t Roy reminding you? You aren’t making a bunch of stupid political appointments, are you?’

Phil was cracking up. ‘See? That’s why we need you down here!’

Charlie sucked down some air. ‘Oh. Ha ha. Very funny. Don’t be scaring me like that, Phil.’

‘I was serious, Charlie. You’d be fine heading the EPA. We need someone there with a global vision of the world’s environmental problems. And we’ll find someone like that. But that wouldn’t be the best use for you, I agree.’

‘Good.’ Charlie felt as if a bullet had just whizzed by his head. He was quivering as he said, very firmly, ‘Let’s just keep things like they are with me.’

‘No, that’s not what I mean, either. Listen, can you come down here and at least talk it over with me? Fit that into your schedule?’

Well, shit. How could he say no? This was his boss, also the President of the United States, speaking. But if he had to talk to him in person about it … He sighed. ‘Yeah, yeah, of course. Your wish is my demand.’

‘Bring Joe, if you can, I’d enjoy seeing him. We can take him out for a spin on the Tidal Basin.’

‘Yeah yeah.’

What else could he say?

The problem was that Yeah Yeah was pretty much the only thing you could say, when replying to the President of the United States making a polite request of you. Perhaps there had been some presidents who had established a limit there, by asking for impossible things and then seeing what happened; power could quickly bring out the latent sadism in the powerful; but if a sane and clever president wanted only ever to get yeses in response to his questions, he could certainly frame them to make it that way. That was just the way it was.

Certainly it was hard to say no to a president-elect inviting you and your toddler to paddle around the Tidal Basin in one of the shiny blue pedal boats docked on the east side of the pond.

And once on the water, it indeed proved very hard to say no to Phil. Joe was wedged between them, lifejacketed and strapped down by Secret Service agents in ways that even Anna would have accepted as safe. He was looking about blissfully; he had even been fully compliant and agreeable about getting into the life jacket and being tied down by the seat belting. It had made Charlie a bit seasick to watch. Now it felt like Phil was doing most of the pumping on the boat’s foot pedals. He was also steering.

Phil was always in a good mood on the water, rapping away about nothing, looking down at Joe, then over the water at the Jefferson Memorial, the most graceful but least emotional of the city’s memorials; beaming at the day, sublimely unaware of the people on the shore path who had noticed him and were exclaiming into their cell phones or taking pictures with them. The Secret Service people had taken roost on the paddle boat dock, and there were an unusual number of men in suits walking the shore among the tourists and joggers.

‘Where I need you in the room,’ Phil said out of the blue, ‘is when we gather a global warming task force. I’ll be out of my depth in that crowd, and there’ll be all kinds of information and plans put forth. That’s where I’ll want your impressions, both real-time and afterward, to help me crosscheck what I think. It won’t do to have me describe these things to you after the fact. There isn’t time for that, and besides I might miss the most important thing.’

‘Yeah, well –’

‘None of that! This task force will be as close to a Department of Science or a Department for the Environment as I can make. It’s going to set the agenda for a lot of what we do. It’ll be my strategy group, Charlie, and I’m saying I need you in it. Now, I’ve looked into the daycare facilities for children at the White House. They’re adequate, and we can get to work making them even better. Joe will be my target audience. You’d like to play all day with a bunch of kids, wouldn’t you Joe?’

‘Yeah Phil,’ Joe said, happy to be included in the conversation.

‘We’ll set up whatever system works best for you, what do you think of that?’

‘I like that,’ Joe said.

Charlie started to mutter something about the Chinese women who buried their infants up to the neck in riverbank mud every day to leave them to go to work in the rice paddies, but Phil overrode him.

‘Gymboree in the basement, if that’s what it takes! Laser tag, paint-ball wars – you name it! You’d like paint-ball wars, wouldn’t you Joe.’

‘Big truck,’ Joe observed, pointing at the traffic on Independence Avenue.

‘Sure, we could have big trucks too. We could have a monster truck pull right on the White House lawn.’

‘Monster truck.’ Joe smiled at the phrase.

Charlie sighed. It really seemed to him that Joe should be shouting big trucks right now, or trying to escape and crawling around among the turning pedals underfoot, or leaping overboard to go for a swim. Instead he was listening peacefully to Phil’s banter, with an expression that said he understood just as much as he wanted to, and approved of it in full.

Ah well. Everyone changed. And in fact, that had been the whole point of the ceremony Charlie had asked the Khembalis to conduct! Charlie had requested it – had insisted on it, in fact! But without, he now realized, fully imagining the consequences.

Phil said, ‘So you’ll do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You more or less have to, right? I mean, you’re the one who first suggested that I run, when we were over at Lincoln.’

‘Everyone was telling you that.’

‘No they weren’t. Besides, you were first.’

‘No, you were. I just thought it would work.’

‘And you were right, right?’

‘Apparently so.’

‘So you owe me. You got me into this mess.’

Phil smiled, waved at some tourists as he made a broad champing turn back toward the other side of the Basin. Charlie sighed. If he agreed, he would not see Joe anywhere near as much as he was used to – an idea he hated. On the other hand, if he didn’t see him as much, he wouldn’t notice so often how much Joe had changed. And he hated that change.

So much to dislike! Unhappily he said, ‘I’ll have to talk to Anna about it first. But I think she’ll go for it. She’s pretty pro-work. So. Shit. I’ll give it a try. I’ll give it a few months, and see how it goes. By that time your task force should be on their way, and I can see where things stand and go emeritus if I need to.’

‘Good.’ And Phil pedaled furiously, almost throwing Charlie’s knees up into his chin with the force of his enthusiasm. He said, ‘Look, Joe, all the people are waving at you!’

Joe waved back. ‘Hi people!’ he shouted. ‘Big truck, right there! Look! I like that big truck. That’s a good truck.’

And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of the fundamental mysteries.

Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming. This was, he thought, an indicator of how happy he had been with the way things were, the situation as he had had it. Mister Mom – he had loved it. Just this last May he had been walking down Leland Street and had passed Djina, one of the Gymboree moms he knew, biking the other way, and he had called out to her ‘Happy Mother’s Day!’ and she had called back, ‘Same to you!’ and he had felt a glow in him that had lasted an hour. Someone had understood.

Of course the pure mom routine of the 1950s was an Ozzie and Harriet nightmare, a crazy-making program so effective that the surprise was there were any moms at all in that generation who had stayed sane. Most of them had gone nuts in one way or another, because in its purest form that life was too constrained to the crucial but mindless daily chores of child-rearing and house maintenance – ‘uncompensated labor,’ as the economists put it, but in a larger sense than what they meant with their idiot bean-counting. Coming in the fifties, hard on the heels of World War Two’s shattering of all norms, its huge chaotic space of dislocation and freedom for young women, it must have felt like a return to prison after a big long break-out.

But that wasn’t the life Charlie had been leading. Along with the child care and the shopping and the housework had been his ‘real’ work as a senatorial aide, which, even though it had been no more than a few phone conversations a day, had bolstered the ‘unreal’ work of Mr. Momhood in a curious dual action. Eventually which work was ‘real’ had become a moot point; the upshot was that he felt fulfilled, and the lucky and accidental recipient of a full life. Maybe even overfull! But that was what happened when Freud’s short list of the important things in life – work and love – were all in play.

He had had it all. And so change be damned! Charlie wanted to live on in this life forever. Or if not forever, then as long as the stars. And he feared change, as being the probable degradation of a situation that couldn’t be bettered.

But here it was anyway, and there was no avoiding it. All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived. This was what the Khembalis were always saying; it was one of the Buddhist basics. And now Charlie had to try to believe it.

So, the day came when he got up, and Anna left for work, then Nick for school; then it was Joe and Da’s time, the whole day spread before them like a big green park. But on this day, Charlie prepped them both to leave, while talking up the change in the routine. ‘Big day, Joe! We’re off to school and work, to the White House! They have a great daycare center there, it’ll be like Gymboree!’

Joe looked up. ‘Gymboree?’

‘Yes, like Gymboree, but not it exactly.’ Charlie’s mood plummeted as he thought of the differences – not one hour but five, or six, or eight, or twelve – and not parents and children together, but the child alone in a crowd of strangers. And he had never even liked Gymboree!

More and more depressed, he strapped Joe into his stroller and pushed him down to the Metro. The tunnel walls were still discolored or even wet in places, and Joe checked everything out as on any other trip. This was one of their routines.

Phil himself was not installed in the White House yet, but the arrangements had been made for Joe to join the daycare there, after which Charlie would leave and walk over to the senate offices in the old Joiner’s Union building. Up and out of the Metro, into warm air, under low windy clouds. People scudded underneath them, hurrying from one shelter to the next before rain hit.

Charlie had gotten out at Smithsonian, and the Mall was almost empty, only a few runners in sight. He pushed Joe along faster and faster, feeling more and more desolate – unreasonably so, almost to the point of despair – especially as Joe continued to babble on happily, energized by the Mall and the brewing storm, no doubt expecting something like their usual picnic and play session on the Mall. Hours that no matter how tedious they had seemed at the time were now revealed as precious islands in eternity, as paradises lost. And it was impossible to convey to Joe that today was going to be different. ‘Joe, I’m going to drop you off at the daycare center here at the White House. You’re going to get to play with the other kids and the teachers and you have to do what the teachers say for a long time.’

‘Cool Dad. Play!’

‘Yeah that’s right. Maybe you’ll love it.’

It was at least possible. Vivid in Charlie’s mind was Anna’s story about taking Nick to daycare for the first time, and seeing Nick’s expression of stoic resignation, which had pierced her so; Charlie had seen the look himself, taking Nick in those first few times. But Joe was no stoic, and would never resign himself to anything. Charlie was anticipating something more like chaos and disorder, perhaps even mayhem, Joe moving from protest to tirade to rampage. But who knew? The way Joe was acting these days, anything was possible. He might love it. He could be gregarious, and he liked crowds and parties. It was really more a matter of liking them too much, taking them too far.

In any case, in they went. Security check, and then inside and down the hall to the daycare center, a well-appointed and very clean place. Lots of little kids running around among toys and play structures, train sets and bookshelves and legos and all. Joe’s eyes grew round. ‘Hey Dad! Big Gymboree!’

‘That’s right, like Gymboree. Except I’m going to go, Joe. I’m going to go and leave you here.’

‘Bye Dad!’ And off he ran without a backward glance.