She didn’t plan on
dying that day. Metro was fucked up so she made the quick hump back to her
apartment to grab her bike. Goddamn she loved that bike. Not just because it
was fun and clean and demanding - the physical antithesis to the impatient polluting
American who usually preferred steering wheels and gasoline, but because it was
the glue connecting her to so many beautiful memories. That bike had been through
the shittiest moments and the most ecstatic. Not just been there - taken her
there. It had occupied the stoops of total strangers-cum-lovers, been the safe
anonymous ride home on countless drunken transcendent early mornings, carried
her to shows, parties, dances, protests, goodbyes, and absolutely bombed the hills home from work on deliciously
cold, clear nights, in the process reviving a soul perpetually on the verge of
being spayed by the sterile, cubicled, deeply constipated world of Official
D.C., where unique creative girls like her had their dreams trimmed and
shoe-horned on an industrial scale. It
went somewhere. It moved. That bike returned her to a life where adventure and wonder
were possible, even normal. Now it was buried in a landfill, the handlebars
sheered off and the frame colored with the red paint of her blood. For the next
ten centuries it would lay beneath flat-screens and lawn mowers and toilets
like so much forgotten debris. A clunkier, less svelte, less sexy, less unique,
less badass, less profoundly loved version had been spray painted white and
chained to a fence meant to keep dogs and the homeless from shitting in the
grass at the intersection of New
York Avenue and 6th Street NW.
<8:02 am="am" down="down" randolph="randolph" straight="straight"> As much as she loved bicycling, the sheer
volume of obstacles the street could foist up routinely demanded a grotesque
amount of effort and tolerance. Most everything on the road looked right
through her, or acted as if a bike were just a slightly smaller open-air car. Drivers
resembled those bean-bag clowns that popped up over and over again no matter
how many times they were dispatched with. Garbage trucks with lengthy strands
of toilet paper flapping off the sides of their rigs and rotting mucinex
cartons spilling out their backside emitted the largest, purest clouds of jet
black soot from their vertical roof-mounted exhaust valves each time they
climbed the faintest incline and took glee in passing her with the slimmest of margins.
Maybe one in a thousand cars stopped for crosswalks.
<8:03 georgia="georgia" left="left" on="on"> It never made sense why everyone was in such an insane
hurry. It never made sense why people rarely talked. It never made sense why
everyone seemed so robotic and lifeless, as if the commute sucked their souls
right out. It never made sense why people read newspapers with a practically
erotic ardor. In New York people ate, drank, played music, partied aboard
subways and no one cared. She enjoyed the mariachi bands that made the circuit
on the 7 or M in Brooklyn; in D.C. they’d be kicked off and fined. In D.C.
strangers had a Darwinian intensity about them; people stared into screens filled
with trepidation at the approaching destination. Railcars were rolling alters
to the power of mobile entertainment, isolating people paradoxically when they
were brought closest together.
It was as if everyone
but her could hear a giant fire alarm announcing the streets were burning. Could
alarm clocks not be set twelve minutes ahead? Were people just naturally
nervous around other people? Were they eager to flee the current trajectory of
their lives? Was Dancing with the Stars
so riveting they had to punch-in early? What was this great relentless energy constantly
propelling the masses all over the place? She didn’t know.
<8:10 7="7" becomes="becomes" georgia="georgia" sup="sup">th
> She thought it might
be that a commute was not primarily a physical journey. For her it was about a
two mile trip from Petworth to the Hill. But over the years it crossed other
dimensions. It also delivered a person from a delightfully careless, educated, even
hip youth, to the perfectly secure perfectly dull ennui of some fine riff on middle
class life. It was the process that gradually changed someone from a morning
Express reader to an Examiner reader, obsessed with the injustice of marginal
tax rates, as if they had some fundamentally redemptive quality. The daily
drudgery could deal enormous blows to people’s belief that there was still the
tiniest thread connecting lives to dreams, that they had skin in the game being
played with their lives. And a million souls a day came in and out of this ten
square mile district. Drudgery was not hard to find.
<8:18 span="span">
Left on Mass Avenue> The security setup for Very Important People,
like motorcades or G8 Summits, gave the appearance that society was an
incredibly dangerous condition. If the sidewalks and neighborhoods people
inhabited every day required a small army to be safe, what was everyone doing
ambling about all the time? The security that day included dozens of garbage
trucks lined-up near Chinatown, designed to act as a swinging gate to close off
New York Avenue down to Massachusetts Avenue, creating a cleared perimeter four
blocks in all directions. Within this area they wouldn’t bat an eye tazing a grandmother.
The truck drivers loved it because it was overtime and they barely had to move.
Plus something about a fleet of garbage trucks protecting Vladimir Putin seemed
about right. When motorcades approached
the secure perimeter they created something in security lingo called a “dead
zone”, which meant that nothing near the street was supposed to move or cross.
Everyday citizens were treated as threats until proven otherwise. Jump-men in
the back of a fleet of Suburbans pointed their guns out the window at stuff - neighbors,
shoppers, strollers, pensioners visiting D.C. for the first and last time.
Frequency jammers on the roofs corrupted conversation. They apologized to no
one, protected no one but their charge. If someone didn’t know better they
could have confused the whole operation for a hostile invasion.
<
Right at Delaware Avenue> In
most facets of life, repetition brought competence, competence bred confidence,
and confidence lead to some measure of comfort and joy. This did not apply to commuting.
No one has come up with an enduring way to fight time and the need to make
money during most of its waking hours, which was maybe why everyone seemed to
be sprinting - sheer flight was the only instinct left. If time and pressure
shaped the earth, time and the commute shaped the typical urban-dweller. < 8:23, Arrive at Russell Office Building.>
She could categorize reactions
to hearing she was a majority staffer on the Senate Health, Education, Labor,
and Pension (HELP) Committee into five types. None more than vaguely accurate.
To her father it recalled scenes of stained trousers and fellattio performed in
large Constitution wall-papered rooms. He didn’t care to know much about his
daughter’s life in the specifics. To her friends, who traded shifts at retail
conglomerates, they envisioned days filled with belittling collating, staplers
and coffee runs. To her mother she routinely filled-in for the President to
sign bills into law. To her roommate it was on level with any other job, only
as promising as the pay, which avoided being illegally low because the group
paying were lawmakers. To others, often nervous talkative boys at bars or tourists
at random street corners, it was possibly the most impressive bit of
information they ever heard.
In reality her job was similar
to one of those 1950’s circuit-board operators, except she routed information
and relationships instead of phone calls. The government’s currency was
confusion. Each day involved trying to figure out what the rest of the
government was doing and why exactly it was doing it, and how it was doing it,
and how much money it was using doing it, at least as it applied to the
Committee’s agenda, which was not very restrictive. Last month featured
testimony from both the Secretary of HHS on Medicare reimbursement rates and the
heads of General Mills and Kellogg’s on essentially the effect of renewable
fuel standards on the price of Corn Pops.
What’s
the guy’s email? Where was their response!? Who cleared this? Who sent this?
Who did they send it to? Why did they send it? Why is this person so upset?
IDK, who does? Where was the latest version of the report? Does it have my
changes? What is the updated calendar? Turn on CNN. What’s the level now? What’s
the vote? Get HHS to answer these two dozen questions by tomorrow.
And so on forever.
Her job was dictated by
the kind of endless, unremarkable questions that would never go away, and
without practice lingered and invaded dreams. Despite their relative simplicity,
definitively answering questions in giant organizations requires an unhealthy
level of dependence on other people. Clearance chains could stretch long enough
to induce vertigo. One could never permanently put anything to rest in D.C.
Someone would always argue, and they would never stop. Everything was always
consumed with the task of being confused and distracted. <6:03 avenue="avenue" delaware="delaware" left="left" on="on" pm="pm">
