by Anna Dove
“A man has got to make a living,” he said suddenly, and nodded his head up and down fervently. “A man has got to be a man and a man has got to make a living. How else will he survive? He’s got to buy and sell his way through the world, there’s just no other way. He’s got to use what he has.” A pause.
“Man to man, gun to gun--yes” he repeated thoughtfully, and fell silent. The breeze passed coolly over his brow, evaporating droplets of sweat that stood out glistening.
From the road to the left of the Supreme Court, another figure appeared. Jack’s eyes flitted quickly, almost instinctively, to the movement, and after a momentary, nearly imperceptible tightening of his posture, he lapsed back into the same sprawling manner, his gaze drifting to the sky. The other figure, a man, approached, walking steadily and easily.
He wore a long brown coat that buttoned around him and concealed the lower third of his face. He was not tall, but not short; his gait bore the brash confidence of a man who is sure of getting exactly what he wants. He had a large forehead and bushy eyebrows that reminded one of caterpillars. Passing under the shadow of a tree, his figure was thrown into darkness, but soon reappeared. Now visible in his hand was a brown paper bag. There seemed to be a bottle or two of some sort protruding from the open top. Without a word, he climbed nimbly up the steps and sat down next to the other. The second individual also looked up at the stars, which were especially clear on this night.
They did not speak for a while, each searching the heavens, one deep in thought and the other deep in liquor.
“So, Rick, what did you bring tonight,” spoke Jack finally, in a bright and cheery tone, turning to his companion with expectation that he made no effort to conceal. The second man pulled from the brown bag two dark bottles and set them by the feet of the drunk.
“Clear sky tonight,” said the newcomer. He spoke with a sort of quiet gravity.
“In March, too,” responded Jack. This elicited no reply, and so Jack reached for one of the bottles, twisted open the top and continued. “Hey, you should bring the real good stuff next week. Remember, like we used to do.”
“You know I will be busy next week, I told you that.”
“Betrayed,” said the drunk in a joking manner, tapping his forefinger to his head and grinning. “And on the Ides of March, how appropriate.”
The newcomer seemed to ponder this for a moment, and then abruptly pulled an envelope from his pocket and handed it to the drunken man. The latter grasped it between his thumb and forefinger, and then stuffed it in his pocket.
“Don’t you want to check it?”
Jack laughed in response to this question.
“I already know what’s in it. When have you ever failed me before? Never. I’ll see you on the west side of the moon.”
“Fair enough,” shrugged the other, his eyes on the sky. And so they remained, silent, until the man in the long jacket glanced at his watch, and seeing that it was almost one in the morning, stood up and wordlessly slipped back the way he had come.
The district of Washington D.C. slept under the night sky. It slumbered like a tired politician, after a long day of committees and conferences, research and rhetoric, speeches and subcommittees, rushing from one place to the next, and one happy hour special too many, sure to give it a slight headache at dawn. It had glowed in the evening, with couture gowns and sparkling gems, smiling faces and red lips, many languages, secrets whispered, pacts formed. It had produced piles of legislation. It had expounded upon the economic, the social, the corporate, the agricultural, going round and round and hopping to and from the aisle sides like a child playing hopscotch. After this exhausting day--and it was only Tuesday--it grew tired, and as the hours crept past midnight--first one, then two, then three--it wandered home after the last sip of champagne, carrying a briefcase full of very important and confidential items, and fell asleep with the self-assertive feeling that it was rather an important city, if it was honest with itself.
It slept now, breathing deep from its belly, an occasional light or sound, but for the most part quiet. Nothing was awake save the great stone monuments, ever gazing with steadfast eye upon the slumbering, bathed in starlight and omitting a faint luminescence quite poetic. What those eyes had seen, what the pale granites had witnessed: change, revolution, fire, war, crime, peace, history rolling on like an eternal cresting wave. Washington stood, the great obelisk, the Father of the Nation, the commander of the Continental Army, the rallying cry of unity in the face of revolution, casting his long image into the shallow reflection pool between it and Lincoln. Lincoln reclined, surrounded by thick pillars, his hands poised on the edges of his chair in such a way that one could not tell if he were at ease or tensed for action, the Preserver of the Union, the orator to silence them all, his words immortalized in the stone walls by his sides. Jefferson sat to their southeast across the tidal basin, the man whose pen while grasped in human hand managed to transcribe in the most eloquent manner the eternal truths of individual rights, which before that point had not been so self-evident.
They watch motionlessly as humans from every nation approach—marveling at their grandeur, wondering for a brief moment about the historical significance, trying to remember if it was George Washington or Abraham Lincoln who had never told a lie. But that perhaps that in itself was a lie. And then the humans move on to the closest hot dog stand to address the more present and temporal needs. Occasionally a passerby has stood in wonder for more than the average time, maybe reflecting on a certain event or ancestor in some way involved in the history represented. They have lifted their eyes reverently, seeking something in the expression or artistry of the monument. But eventually, even the curious step back, turn away, and are swallowed again into the cresting wave. The monuments have seen it all, and they stand unmoved in the soft starlight like great, beautiful, silent ghosts.
This night in mid-March of the year two thousand and thirty three was especially quiet, the soft winds rustling the cherry blossoms and sending pink petals wafting to the dewed ground below. The roads were deserted, the restaurants and shops dim. Hours ago Mr. Smith had flipped the open sign to the closed side, and taking his coat from the rack, he had gone home to a pot roast and three well-behaved children. Mrs. Brown had finished her last editorial note and had gathered her purse, taking the metro home to her husband and her cat. Miss Tucker and Mr. Jones had decided that they had better go to their respective homes soon, as Miss Tucker had a boyfriend and Mr. Jones had drunk too much whiskey. Their chairs, now deserted, rested upside down on tables visible through window fronts and the streets that bustled by day now stretched empty.
An officer approached Jack, shining a flashlight on the sprawling frame. Just another drunk in DC, more plentiful than corn in Nebraska.
“Got to get a move on sir.”
“You know,” mused Jack, not looking at the officer, “I fought for your freedom to say that.”
The officer saw the label of the bottle Jack held, and tilted his head.
“Expensive liquor you have there. How did you come by that?”
“I feel as if you’re insinuating that I stole it.”
“Nope,” replied the officer, “just asking.”
“Good. Ever heard of Richard Armand? Special Assistant to the White House Chief of Staff Snyder Reed? Well, he gave it to me.”
“Right, okay. Time to get a move on. I won’t say it again.”
“It’s always move along, Jack,” said Jack lightly, almost comically. “Move along. But see, officer, I’m stuck to these steps, I can’t get them out of my head. I can’t really move along, as you see. I just can’t seem to do it, deepest apologies. Thank you for your work, we need people like you.” He shifted and the officer stuck out a hand to assist him to his feet, which Jack waved away. “Okay, alright then,” continued Jack, rising unsteadily, “Alright. Fair. I’m just a drunk, what do I know. Barely anything at all.”
He rose from the steps of the Supreme Court and walked off in the
opposite direction, and was soon lost from sight in the web of dark streets.
9. Make It Go Away
“When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk
Jack Hoffman awoke from a stupor near the Eisenhower building, still very drunk. He found himself sprawled out on a bench. It could not be much later than noon, judging by the sun’s position. He had just received his financial allotment the day before from his trench-coated friend and had promptly spent an exorbitant quantity on a handle of quality bourbon and a variety of other smaller bottles, which he had stowed away in his backpack. The night before, looking up at the moon, which peered effervescently down from its celestial throne, he had drained more than half of the bourbon while sitting on that same bench and watching the people around him.
Now, in the midday haze between drunkenness and a hangover, he watched. A woman, red trousers, a man, blue suit. French, English, and there was some Farsi too. Jabbering on and on, incessant phone calls. What could these people possibly be caring so much about? Their heads down, their eyes fixed on the ground before their feet, studiously avoiding eye contact with other human beings. A bus roared by--a metro bus, its red and yellow sides gleaming in the sun. Jack squinted his dark eyes.
The movement of his facial muscles, the glare of the bus, the reflection of the sunlight too bright to bear--suddenly his mind jolted to another scene that arrested his mental process and scattered all other thoughts. His body tensed involuntarily.
There, in front of him as clear as day, was a long stretching desert, a sand expanse with rising and falling red dunes that met the pale blue sky hundreds of miles away. The glare--the merciless sun beat into his eyes, he squinted, and wrinkles around his eyes deepened, crevicing into the thin skin stretched over his high cheekbones. Heat rising from the sweltering dunes danced in the air, blurring the lines around him.
His gun, tucked in the back of his belt, bore into his back. The heavy linen shirt he wore, meant to protect him from the sun’s rays, only trapped the heat closer to his skin, and the sweat dripped down the nape of his neck and down his back and chest.
Then, the desert vanished just as soon as it had come, its sweltering heat and rolling dunes disappearing into thin air, and in its place were the passing metro bus, and the woman in red trousers and the man in the blue suit. Phones pressed to their ears, eyes on their feet, they passed Jack as he sprawled on the bench, purposefully avoiding looking at his grimy clothing and long, thin frame.
A woman and a child, a young child perhaps two years old, were on the other side of the street, and Jack watched with bloodshot eyes as the child clung to its mother’s hand. The child could barely walk. Perhaps it had only learned a few months prior. It tottered and stumbled but clung with a death grip to the hand of its mother. The mother knelt down by the child and wiped a bit of dirt off its cheek. The child resisted, but the mother prevailed much to the chagrin of the child.
“Never had a kid,” said Jack to no one in particular. “I wish she could have.”
Those within earshot glanced his way and scuttled a little farther from the bench, and soon the mother and the child across the street rounded a corner and passed out of view.
Jack, his head spinning, closed his eyes again after staring up at the blue spring sky. He was close to falling asleep when a series of crashing sounds awakened him.
He sat up immediately, his senses alive instantly from many years of training. Scanning the street, he immediately found the source of the noise. A Prius had wrapped itself around a pole. An instant later, as he watched, the other cars began to crash into each other, and screams echoed up around him. He watched calmly as pedestrians began to run frantically. As the chaos set in, Jack sat on the bench, quietly observing, his dark eyes absorbing the surrounding madness as if he were the eye of a hurricane.
10. 900 Down in Chimaugua
“To understand why and even how this bunker was built — right under the noses of America's vacationing aristocrats — you have to go back to the mid-1950s, when a whole industry built around the construction of fall-out shelters started to take off.”
— NPR news article, The Secret Bunker Congress Never Used, 2011
Chimaugua bunker was a grim space reminiscent of wartime eras. Sunk nine hundred feet below the surface of Chimaugua, Virginia, it stretched half a mile in length. It comprised a labyrinth of rooms and passageways, leading toward one giant conference space.
The walls were five feet thick of solid steel, cool to the touch. White granite slabs covered the floor, over a steel base, and occasional piping ran up the sides of rooms. There were four huge water tanks that drew from an underground spring, and whose pipelines ran throughout the bunker, distributing water for drinking or bathrooms. A deeper cellar as large as a warehouse stored massive quantities of nonperishable foods, as well as dehydrated food packs. A massive, gas-fueled generator pulsed electrical current throughout the lighting system, and the system, being encased in steel, was protected against the effects of the EMP. Along corridors there hung evenly spaced lightbulbs about forty feet away from each other; the bedrooms, bathrooms and meeting rooms each contained one glaringly bright overhead light. The entire structure was designed with the greatest economy of organization. In all, the space measured fifty thousand square feet, smaller than its predecessors.
From the tunnels below the White House to the bunker in Chimaugua stretched a highly classified and protected train route. The entire system was encased in metal and could withstand nuclear electromagnetic pulses.
Once anyone exited the train, they would find themselves in a preliminary bunker, lined with armed guards. Each passenger would be identified and screened, stripped of any weapons or hazardous materials, and then allowed one by one onto an elevator. This elevator, powered by a traditional pulley mechanism, lowered the individual four hundred feet, and then stopped for forty seconds to allow for pressure adjustment, then the remaining five hundred feet. The individual would then be screened again by more armed guards, and would finally find themselves allowed into the bunker entrance, provided that they were unarmed at this point. If the second set of guards did not believe the individual fit for entrance, the individual would be sent back up the elevator shaft, stopping at the same points for pressure adjustment.
This system had only been used once before, by former President Jimmy Carter, when there was reported a nuclear submarine targeting Washington. The Greenbrier Bunker was thought to have been compromised. However, the alarm had been false and the evacuation was quickly reversed in a matter of thirty six hours, and the entire scenario kept from the public eye. Every year, the Department of Defense regularly updated and tested the bunker, keeping it in prime condition and stocked with emergency food and medical supplies.
The train had now departed Washington, having been authorized by the president. He sat in the front car with his wife, whose usually animated face was stone cold. Reed sat with them, motionless and expressionless, staring at the door at the end of their car. No one spoke, as there was nothing to be said; the enormity of the situation loomed before them and silenced their tongues.
In the cars following sat a group of individuals who had been at the White House when the attack hit. There were the West Wing assembly, comprising the Principal Deputy Press Secretary Gordon Tarnes, the Press Secretary Milton Brando, the Communications Director Angelica Martinez, the National Security Advisor Franklin Simons and his deputy Bill Clark, the Executive Assistant to the President Mary Jo Anderson. The Director of the CIA, Danika
Limon, had been in the building as well, with two well-known generals: Braddock and Simpson. The Vice President was in Los Angeles, and no one had heard anything from him.
They would be joined later, per the protocol, by many others: the Secretary of Defense Arnold Adams and the directors of the FBI and NSA Hilton and Perkins.The Capitol Police Force would also escort down any members of Congress or Supreme Court Justices that they could find.
As the train sped southward, the company sat with their hands clasped, their knuckles white, their eyes either closed in prayer or darting back and forth in deep thought. No one moved; rather they sat like stone soldiers welded to their seats.
“Fuck,” Gordon Tarnes broke out suddenly, looking apoplectic, “Is no one going to say anything?”
Tarnes was a small, cleanly cut individual. He led his press briefings with vigor and precision, and moved rather like a cat, dashing from one place to the next with a trail of assistants and reporters in his wake. He was a brainy fellow, well-spoken, but physically quite unassuming, especially in comparison to the broad shouldered Braddock and Simpson, who sat across from him with the stars flashing on their crisp uniforms. Braddock and Simpson looked like brothers, both with oversized width and height, giant knobby hands, square jaws and deep set scowling brow. Braddock was slightly larger.
“Take a breath, Tarnes,” said Simpson, in a somber tone with incredible resonance in its depth.
Mary Jo Anderson burst into tears. She was young, perhaps thirty. In a sudden, jerky gesture she moved her hands to her face, her body shaking, then lept from her seat to go stand with her back to the company in the far corner of the car.
“It’s too much,” said Tarnes under his breath, and began to wring his hands and tap his foot on the floor frantically.
