“Ha ha ha. I’d like to see that.”

“Jesus no.”

“What are you going in for?”

“I need to talk to Phil. I had a dream this morning that I could convince anybody of anything, even Joe. I convinced Phil to reintroduce the Chinese aerosols bill, and then I got you to approve it.”

“That poison ivy has driven you barking mad.”

“Very true. It must be the steroids. I mean, the clouds today are like pulsing. They don’t know which way to go.”

“That’s probably right, there’s two low-pressure systems colliding here today, didn’t you hear?”

“How could I not.”

“They say it’s going to rain really hard.”

“Looks like I’ll beat it to the office, though.”

“Good. Hey listen, when Phil gets in, don’t be too hard on him. He already feels bad enough.”

“He does?”

“Well, no. Not really. I mean, when have you ever seen Phil feel bad about anything?”

“Never.”

“Right. But, you know. He would feel bad about this if he were to go in for that kind of thing. And you have to remember, he’s pretty canny at getting the most he can get from these bills. He sees the limits and then does what he can. It’s not a zero-sum game to him. He really doesn’t think of it as us-and-them.”

“But sometimes it is us-and-them.”

“True. But he takes the long view. Later some of them will be part of us. And meanwhile, he finds some pretty good tricks. Breaking the superbill into parts might have been the right way to go. We’ll get back to a lot of this stuff later.”

“Maybe. We never tried the Chinese aerosols again.”

“Not yet.”

Charlie stopped listening to check the street he was crossing. When he started listening again Roy was saying, “So you dreamed you were Xenophon, eh?”

“How’s that?”

“Xenophon. He wrote the Anabasis, which tells the story of how he and a bunch of Greek mercenaries got stuck and had to fight all the way across Turkey to get home to Greece. They argue the whole time about what to do, and Xenophon wins every argument, and all his plans always work perfectly. I think of it as the first great political fantasy novel. So who else did you convince?”

“Well, I got Joe to potty train himself, and then I convinced Anna to leave the kids at home and go with me on a vacation to Jamaica.”

Roy laughed heartily. “Dreams are so funny.”

“Yeah, but bold. So bold. Sometimes I wake up and wonder why I’m not as bold as that all the time. I mean, what have we got to lose?”

“Jamaica, baby. Hey, did you know that some of those hotels on the north shore there are catering to couples who like to have a lot of semipublic sex, out around the pools and the beaches?”

“Talk about fantasy novels.”

“Yeah, but don’t you think it’d be interesting?”

“You are sounding kind of, I don’t want to say desperate here, but deprived maybe?”

“It’s true, I am. It’s been weeks.”

“Oh poor guy. It’s been weeks since I left my house.”

Actually, for Roy a few weeks was quite a long time between amorous encounters. One of the not-so-hidden secrets of Washington, D.C., was that among the ambitious young single people gathered there to run the world, there was a whole lot of collegial sex going on. Now Roy said dolefully, “I guess I’ll have to go dancing tonight.”

“Oh poor you! I’ll be at home not scratching myself.”

“You’ll be fine. You’ve already got yours. Hey listen, my food has come.”

“So where are you anyway?”

“Bombay Club.”

“Ah geez.” This was a restaurant run by a pair of Indian-Americans, its decor Raj, its food excellent. A favorite of staffers, lobbyists and other political types. Charlie loved it.

“Tandoori salmon?” he said.

“That’s right. It looks and smells fantastic.”

“Yesterday my lunch was Gerber’s baby spinach.”

“No. You don’t really eat that stuff.”

“Yeah sure. It’s not so bad. It could use a little salt.”

“Yuck!”

“Yeah, see what I do is I mix a little spinach and a little banana together?”

“Oh come on quit it!”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

The light under the thunderheads had gone dim. Rain was soon to arrive. The cloud bottoms were black. Splotches like dropped water balloons starred the sidewalk pavement. Charlie started hurrying, and got to Phil’s office just ahead of a downpour.

He looked back out through the glass doors and watched the rain grow in strength, hammering down the length of the Mall. The skies had really opened. The raindrops remained large in the air; it looked like hail the size of baseballs had coalesced in the thunderheads, and then somehow been melted back to rain again before reaching the ground.

Charlie watched the spectacle for a while, then went upstairs. There he found out from Evelyn that Phil’s flight in had been delayed, and that he might be driving back from Richmond instead.

Charlie sighed. No conferring with Phil today.

He read reports instead, and made notes for when Phil did arrive. Went down to get his mailbox cleared. Evelyn’s office window had a southerly view, with the Capitol looming to the left, and across the Mall the Air and Space Museum. In the rainy light the big buildings took on an eerie cast. They looked like the cottages of giants.

Then it was past noon, and Charlie was hungry. The rain seemed to have eased a bit since its first impact, so he went out to get a sandwich at the Iranian deli on C Street, grabbing an umbrella at the door.

Outside it was raining steadily but lightly. The streets were deserted. Many intersections had flooded to the curbs, and in a few places well over the curbs, onto the sidewalks.

Inside the deli the grill was sizzling, but the place was almost as empty as the streets. Two cooks and the cashier were standing under a TV that hung from a ceiling corner, watching the news. When they recognized Charlie they went back to looking at the TV. The characteristic smell of basmati rice and hummus enfolded him.

“Big storm coming,” the cashier said. “Ready to order?”

“Yeah, thanks. I’ll have the usual, pastrami sandwich on rye and potato chips.”

“Flood too,” one of the cooks said.

“Oh yeah?” Charlie replied. “What, more than usual?”

The cashier nodded, still looking at the TV. “Two storms and high tide. Upstream, downstream and middle.”

“Oh my.”

Charlie wondered what it would mean. Then he stood watching the TV with the rest of them. Satellite weather photos showed a huge sheet of white pouring across New York and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile that tropical storm was spinning past Bermuda. It looked like another perfect storm might be brewing, like the eponymous one of 1991. Not that it took a perfect storm these days to make the Mid-Atlantic states seem like a literal designation. A far less than perfect storm could do it. The TV spoke of eleven-year tide cycles, of the longest and strongest El Niño ever recorded. “It’s a fourteen-thousand-square-mile watershed,” the TV said.

“It’s gonna get wet,” Charlie observed.

The Iranians nodded silently. Five years earlier they would probably have been closing the deli, but this was the fourth “perfect storm” synergistic combination in the last three years, and they, like everyone else, were getting jaded. It was Peter crying wolf at this point, even though the previous three storms had all been major disasters at the time, at least in some places. But never in D.C. Now people just made sure their supplies and equipment were okay and then went about their business, umbrella and phone in hand. Charlie was no different, he realized, even though he had been performing the role of Peter for all he was worth when it came to the global situation. But here he was, getting a pastrami sandwich with the intention of going back to work. It seemed like the best way to deal with it.

The Iranians finally finished his order, all the while watching the TV images: flooding fields, apparently in the upper Potomac watershed, near Harpers Ferry.