The Short Takes

by James Grady

  Sometimes crazy is the way to go.

  Jeremy’s blue eyes narrowed, his hands were fists.

  Feel the vibe. See the movie.

  Sunny blue sky behind the white dome of the US Capitol. Across the street rises a castle with a green metal top and giant gray concrete walls of columns and grand staircases, windows behind which people work, a fountain out front where bronze green statues of Greek gods flirt and pose their indomitable will.

  Tremble/rumble! The Library of Congress’s Jefferson building shudders sprays out exploded concrete dust like 9/11, like Oklahoma City. Fireballs nova through castle rooms of wood panels, wood shelves, books that no one would see again. Those walls crumble to rubble. The last moment of the castle’s cohesion is a cacophony of screams.

  You’ll never make it to the door. Locked anyway. And he’s between you and its remote control on the workbench by the computer umbilical chorded to an ultra phone.

  Make it real: “You and Fran.”

  “She’s just a woman,” said Jeremy. “More useful than a donkey, not as trainable. Like, deluded. Like all women in this Babylon where they don’t know their place.”

  “Oh, I like all the places they will go,” said Condor, quoting the book he’d heard read a million billion times to a frightened child traveling beside his mother on a bus through a dark Texas night. “Where’d Fran take those two coffins—crates that you and her use to smuggle in C4?”

  “Somewhere for her stupid crusade.”

  For her stupid crusade. Not our.

  A lot of roads run through Crazytown.

  Jeremy took a step closer.

  Condor flowed to walk a martial arts Bagua circle around him.

  Almonds, a strong whiff in the air of what had been stockpiled down here.

  “She even bribed you,” guessed Condor as Jeremy turned to keep the silver-haired man from circling behind him.

  “She funded the will of God.”

  “Fran thought the only God she was funding was hers. Didn’t know about yours.”

  “My God is the only God.”

  “That’s what all you people say.”

  Why is there a floppy flat empty red rubber water bottle on the floor?

  Condor feinted. Jeremy flinched: he’s a puncher, maybe from a shopping mall dojo or hours watching YouTubes of Jihad stars showing their wannabe homegrown brothers out there the throat-cutting ways of Holy warriors.

  “Slats!” said Condor. “On the inside bottom of the crates. Reinforcing slats, they make a narrow trough. Somewhere outside, after you dump the books, you mold C4 into those slats—cream color, looks like glue on the wood if the guard outside checks. Odds are the guard won’t check all the crates every time, you only use two, and even if somebody checks, nobody notices.

  “Fran paid you to cut her out a couple crates before you delivered them. That gave you time with the crates in here to peel out what you hid, pass them on to her, she gives them back full of what you don’t care about to fold back into the coffin count.”

  “Way to go, cowboy.” Jeremy had that flat accent born in Ohio near the river. “You get to witness the destruction of the Great Satan’s temple of heretical thought.”

  “Wow, did they email you a script?”

  “You think I’d be so careless as to let the NSA catch me contacting my true brothers in the Middle East before I proved myself—”

  Lunge, Jeremy lunged and Condor whirled left—whirled right—snake-struck in a three-beat Hsing-i counter-charge to—

  Pepper spray burned Condor’s face.

  Breathe can’t breathe eyes on fire!

  The Holy warrior slammed his other fist into the silver-haired man’s guts.

  Condor was already gasping for air and flooding tears because of pepper spray. The barbell muscled punch buckled and bent him over, knocked him toward the workbench, teetering, stumbling—crashing to the floor.

  Get up! Get up! Get to your knees—

  The blue-eyed fanatic slapped Vin, a blow more for disrespect than destruction.

  Condor saw himself flopping in slow motion. Kneeling gasping on the hard floor. His arms waving at his sides couldn’t fly him away or fight his killer.

  White cable connects the laptop to iPhone: Jeremy rips that chord free.

  Whips its garrote around the kneeling man’s neck.

  Gurgling clawing at the chord cutting off blood to brain air to lungs, pepper-sprayed eyes blurring, a roar, a whooshing in his ears, can’t—

  BZZZZ!

  That doorbell buzz startles the strangler, loosens his pull.

  Blood rush to the brain, air!

  BZZZZ!

  Strangler jerks his garrote tight.

  GLASS RATTLES as someone outside bangs on that door.

  Can’t scream gagging here in here help me in here get in here!

  Jeremy spun Condor around and slammed him chest-first into the workbench.

  Hands, your hands on the workbench, claw at—

  Seven seconds before blackout, he saw.

  The remote for the door. Wobbling on the workbench. Flop reach grab—

  The jihad warrior whirled the gurgling apostate away from the high tech gear.

  Thumb the remote.

  The door buzzes—springs open.

  Fran.

  Screaming charging rushing IN!

  Jeremy knees Condor, throws him to the floor and the garrote—

  The garrote goes loose around Condor’s neck but won’t unwrap itself from the strangler’s hands, holds his arms trapped low.

  “Stop it!” Fran screams at the treasonous pawn who’s trying to steal her destiny. “He’s mine to kill!”

  Down from heaven stabs her gray metal spring-blade knife confiscated from a tourist, salvaged from storage by an LOC staffer who could steal any of the castles’ keys.

  Fran drove her stolen blade into Jeremy’s throat.

  Gasping grabbing his hands to his neck/what sticks out of there.

  Wide eyed, his hands grab GOT HER weakness percolates up from his feet by the prone Vin, up Jeremy’s legs, he’s falling holding on to Fran, death grips her blouse that rips open as the force of his pull multiplied by his fall jerks her forward—

  Fran trips over sprawled Condor.

  Swan dives through the air over the crumpling man she stabbed.

  Crashes cracks her skull on the workbench’s sharp corner.

  Spasms falls flat across the man she stabbed whose body pins Condor to the floor.

  Silence. Silence.

  Crawl out from under the dead.

  Hands, elbows, and knees pushing on the concrete floor, straining, pulling …

  Free. Alive. Face down on the floor, gasping scents of cement and dust, sweat and the warm ham and cabbage smell of savaged flesh. A whiff of almonds.

  Jackhammer in his chest:

  No heart attack, not after all this. Come on: a little justice.

  Condor flopped over onto his back.

  Saw only the castle’s flat ceiling.

  Propped himself up on his elbows. Sat. Dizzy. Sore from punches, getting kneed, strangled. Pepper-spray, tears, floor dirt, sweat: his face was caked. Must look like hell.

  Nobody will let you walk away from this.

  Almonds, C4: where’s the C4?

  The workbench, the laptop, glowing screen full of …

  A floor plan. The LOC jewel, the main castle Jefferson Building.

  A pop-ad flashed over the map, a smiling salesman above a flow of words:

  “Congratulations on your new cell phone basic business plan. Now consider moving beyond mere networked teleconferencing to—”

  The white computer chord garrote lay on the floor like a dead snake.

  A snake that once connected the laptop computer to an iPh
one.

  An iPhone capable of activating all cell phones on its conferenced network.

  A for charity tub that gobbles up donated old cell phones from our better souls.

  The iPhone screen glowed with the LOC castle map and its user-entered red dots.

  Dizzy: he staggered toward the wall sink, splashed water on his face, empty plastic water bottles in a tub right by that weird red rubber bag that doesn’t belong here.

  Vision: Jeremy smiling his Ohio smile, walking through the metal detectors with the baggy crotch of his pants hiding a red rubber bottle full of goo that’s not water.

  Grab the roller tub for donated cell phones. Close the laptop, put it in the tub beside the iPhone. The phone glowed the map of the castle.

  The crisscrossed corpses on the floor kept still.

  How long before anyone finds you?

  Thumb the remote, the door swings open. Push the plastic tub on wheels into the hall. Condor pulled his blue shirt out of his waistband, used it to polish his fingerprints off the remote, then toss it back through the closing door into the basement shop, plastic skidding along the concrete floor to where the dead lay.

  Go!

  Race the rumbling plastic tub on wheels through the tunnels of the Adams building to the main castle of Jefferson, down into its bowels and follow the map on the iPhone screen to a mammoth water pipe. Gray duct taped on the inflow water pipe’s far side: a cellphone wired as a detonator into a tan book-sized gob of goo.

  Boom and no water for automatic sprinklers to fight fire.

  Boom and water floods an American castle.

  Pull the wires out of the gob of C4. Pull them from the phone. Pull the phone’s battery. Toss the dead electronics into the tub.

  What do you do with a handful of C4?

  A shot bullet won’t set it off. And C4 burns. Only electricity makes it go Boom!

  Squeeze the C4 into a goo ball, shove it into your black jacket’s pocket.

  Condor charged the plastic tub on wheels to the next map number on the iPhone: bomb against a concrete weight-bearing wall. The iPhone led him to three more bombs. Each time he ripped away the electronics and squeezed the goo into a shape he could hide in his jacket pockets, and when they were full, he stuffed C4 goo inside his underpants.

  Boom.

  Run, catch that elevator, roll in with the tub. A man and a woman ride with you. He’s a gaudy green St. Patrick’s Day tie. She looks tired. Neither of them cares about you, about what happens in your crotch if the elevator somehow sparks static electricity.

  Next floor plan in the iPhone.

  Stacks, row after row of wooden shelves and burnable books and there, under a bookshelf, another cell phone wired goo ball. Rubber bands bind this apparatus to a clear plastic water bottle full of a gray gel that a bomb will burst into a fireball.

  Lay the bottle of napalm atop the cell phones in the wheeled tub.

  Your underpants are full.

  Cinch the rubber bands from that bomb around the ankles of your pants. Feed a snake of C4 down alongside your naked leg in the black jeans.

  Roll on oh so slowly.

  Hours, it takes him hours, slowed more by every load of C4 he stuffs in his pants, inside his blue shirt, in the sleeves of his black leather jacket.

  Hours, he rolls through the Jefferson building for hours following iPhone maps made by an obsessed fanatic. Rolls past tours of ordinary citizens, past men and women with lanyard I.D. Rumbles down office corridors, through the main reading room with its gilded dome ceiling, until the final red X on the last swooped-to page of the iPhone’s uploaded maps represents only another pulled apart bomb.

  In an office corridor, a door: MEN’S ROOM.

  Cradle all the napalm water bottles in your arms.

  The restroom is bright and mirrored, a storm of lemon ammonia.

  And empty.

  Lay screwed open water bottles in the sink so they gluck gluck down that drain.

  One bottle won’t fit. Shuffle it into the silver metal stall.

  Can’t stop, exhausted, drained, slide down that stall wall, slump to sitting on the floor, hugging the toilet like some two beers too many teenager.

  The C4 padding his body makes it hard to move, but he drains the last non-recyclable water bottle into the toilet. That silver handle pushes down with a whoosh.

  The world does not explode.

  He crawled out of the stall. Made sure the water bottles in the sink were empty. Left them there. Left the tub of cellphones and wires in the hall for janitors to puzzle over. Dumped Jeremy’s laptop in a litter barrel. Waddled to an elevator, a hall, down corridors and down the tunnel slope to the Adams building toward his own office.

  Kept going.

  Up, main floor, the blonde went this way, there’s the door to the street, you can—

  Man’s voice behind Condor yells: “You!”

  The blue pinstripe suit DOSP. Who blinks. Leans back from the smell of sweat and some kind of nuts, back from the haggard wild-eyed man in the black leather jacket.

  “Are you quite all right, Mister … Vin?”

  “Does that matter?” says this pitiful excuse for a government employee foisted on the DOSP by another agency.

  Who then unzips his black leather jacket, fumbles inside it, pulls out—

  A fountain pen Vin hands to the DOSP, saying: “‘Guess I’m a sword guy.”

  Vin waddled away from his stricken silent LOC boss.

  Stepped out into twilight town.

  They’ll never let you get away with this.

  Capitol Hill sidewalk. Suit and ties with briefcases and work-stuffed backpacks, kids on scooters. That woman’s walking a dog. The cool air promises spring. An umbrella of night cups the marble city. Some guy outside a bar over on Pennsylvania Avenue sings Danny Boy. Budding trees along the curb make a canopy against the streetlights’ shine and just keep going, one foot in front of the other.

  Go slow so nothing shakes out of your clothes.

  Talking heads blather from an unseen TV, insist this, know that, sell whatever.

  Waves of light dance on that three-story-high townhouse alley wall. Music in the air from the alley courtyard’s flowing light. Laughter.

  Barbecue and green beer inspired the St. Paddy’s Day party thrown by the not-yet-thirty men and women in that group house. They did their due diligence, reassured their neighbors, come on over, we’re getting a couple of kegs, buckets of ice for Cokes and white wine, craft or foreign beers for palates that had become pickier since college. There was a table for munchies. Texted invites blasted out at 4:20 before “everybody” headed out to the holiday bars after work. Zack rigged his laptop and speakers, played DJ so any woman who wanted a song had to talk to him and his wingman who was a whiz at voter precinct analyses but could never read a curl of lipstick.

  Bodies packed the alley.

  Everybody worked their look, the cool stance, the way to turn your face to scan the crowd, the right smile. Lots of cheap suits and work ensembles, khakis and sports jackets, jeans that fit better than Condor’s bulging pants. Cyber screens glow in the crowd like the stars of a universe centered by whoever holds the cellphone. Hormones and testosterone amidst smoke from the two troughs made from a fifty-gallon drum sliced lengthwise by a long gone tenant of yore. Those two barbecue barrels started out the evening filled by charcoal briquettes and a Whump! of lighter fluid. By the time Condor’d eased his way to the center of the churning crowd, a couple guys from a townhouse up the street had tossed firewood onto the coals so flames leapt high and danced shadows on the alley courtyard’s walls. The crowd surged as Zack turned up the volume on a headbanger song from the wild daze of their parents.

  Who were Condor’s age.

  Or younger.

  Hate that song, he thought.

  He reached the inner
edge of the crowd who amidst the flickering light tried not to see the getting there debts pressing down on them or the pollution from the barrel fires trapping tomorrow’s sun. They’d made it here to this city, this place, this idea. They worked for the hero who’d brought them to town, for Congress of course that would matter, so would the group/the project/the committee/the caucus/the association/the website they staffed, the Administration circus ring that let them parade lions or tigers or bears, oh my, the downtown for dollars firm that pulled levers, the Agency or Department they powered with their sweat and so they could, they should sweat here, now, in the flickering fire light of an alley courtyard. Swaying. Looking. Hoping for a connection—heart, mind, flesh, community: get what you can, if nothing else a contact, a move toward more. The music surged. An American beat they all knew pulsed this crowd who were white and black, Hispanic and Asian, men and women and maybe more, who came from purple mountains’ majesty and fruited plains to claim the capital city for this dream or that, to punch a ticket for their career, to get something done or get a deal, to do or to be—that is this city’s true question and they, oh they, they were the answer now.

  Near the burning barrels, a dozen couples jumped and jived to their generation’s music blaring out of the speakers. Glowing cellphones and green dotted the crowd—bowlers, top hats. Over there was a woman in green foil boa. That woman blew a noisemaker as she shuffled and danced solo—not alone, no, she was not alone, don’t anyone dare think that she was alone. She saw him, a guy old enough to be her father, all battered face lost in space, heard herself yell the question you always ask in Washington: “What do you do?”

  He felt the heat of the flames.

  “Hey old guy!” yelled Zack, DJ earphones cupped around his neck like the hands of a strangler. “This one’s for you. My dad loves it.”

  Zack keyboarded a YouTubed live concert, Bruce Springsteen blasting Badlands.

  Cranked up the volume as elsewhere in this empire city night, silver lip looped Kim shyly thanked a man with a mustache for being the knight by her side, for dinner, for sure, coffee at work tomorrow morning, for however much more they might have.

  But in that alley, in that pounding drums and crashing guitars night, lovers like that became just part of the intensity of it all, like individual books in the library stacks of stories stretching into our savage forever.