Drt (4 page)

I felt my throat close, I ran over to her, assuming the child had slipped into one of the fountains. “Where’s the kid?” I screamed.

The girl turned to me. “She’s drowning!” her crying stopped immediately. “Drowning in pollution, that is,” the girl pulled a clipboard from behind her backpack. “Hi, I’m Becky from the NAOCIWS & WT, which I am sure you’ve heard of before as the National Association of Overly Chemicled Inland Water Supplies and Water Tables. Did you know that the sewage system has been found to be polluted with consumed chemicals from the various people digesting medications? We are concerned that those chemicals are getting into the water supply…”

DC is crawling with canvassers. Every cause that you could ever imagine, and many that you never could, have a nonprofit office in DC. They employ young people and all of them perform these kinds of public hysterics to hook you, insisting you contribute money to various crucial causes. I didn’t normally see canvassers because I work so late at night. This is why I was the only one who fell for this woman who wanted me to give her a monthly gift so that her organization could fight against medicine. She pitched me for a couple of minutes while I stood there catching my breath; I resisted the urge to slap her and walked away without saying anything.
 

I went into Starbucks, fell into a comfy chair, and listened to idle conversation and overhead music. Considering I was falling into a spiral of anxiety, this noise was the last thing I needed. I closed my eyes, slunk back into the chair, and tried to calm down. I decided that distraction was the way to go. I resolved that tonight, I would do anything I could to keep myself from thinking about things that made me anxious.
 

After a while I was calm, I looked down at my watch. It was 8pm, good enough. I got up and walked back to the office, through those familiar revolving doors, and entered the lobby blissfully unaware that tonight would change everything forever.

There. Like I said, I only needed three quick chapters to set it up. Now let’s go back to the truck.

5

I felt like a man spared from execution, happy to be doing my job, when I walked across the linoleum toward my station. The radio terminals were all the same. They were on long black island tables that ran the length of the room, facing a row of cubicled terminals. The cubicled terminals were everyone’s desired destination, the stars broadcasted from them. I spent ten years working at that network and all I got was a microphone in the middle of the room.
 

Amy was sitting down at a table on the far side of the room, her skinny legs drawn to her chest. She was leaned back in the dirty chair with a blank expression on her face. She was concentrating on a desktop monitor in front of her but would take the occasional look over to the brown stickered laptop just to her right, gazing at it with her glassy blue eyes.

I said hello to Amy every day. She didn’t always respond back. Most days she would just keep staring at her computer screens but some days she would respond, either with a greeting or a wave. In those days, that made Amy the person who I talked to more than anyone else.
 

Amy was 19; her good looks got her an easy job at the network. It seems to be true in every aspect of life that being born with genetic symmetry opens a lot of doors for people. She was thin as a rail and tall. Her formerly blond hair dyed too many times and it now had that reddish gray look of a mop that needs to be retired. She wore long sleeves that dog-eared at her wrists, revealing flat black tattoos that twisted together from a place somewhere up her arm.
 

When she first started at the network, Amy found a quick way into TV. She did afternoon on-camera hits in the big studio but soured on that after a couple of months. Producers at the station had a parade of probing questions. They picked at the words she used, clothes she wore, references she made, demeanor she carried and the color of her eyes. They said she looked too young, too old, too vapid, too loquacious, too plain, too extravagant. The constant barrage of inconsistent ambiguity led her to start dying her hair colors that were too garish to be identified by PMS code. She considered it her way of quitting through conscientious objection. At one point, the horrified station sent an actual wig for her and she wore it crooked on her head with her then blue hair sprouting from underneath. The tattoos were the final straw. She was relegated to second shift radio duty and always sat at the far table, alternating between painting her nails and gnawing on them, wearing the face and attitude of a person who didn’t give a shit about anything anymore.
 

“I had a great day today,” I said to her, attempting conversation.

“That’s terrific,” she said, without looking up.
 

“I messed up pretty bad last night and I thought I was going to get fired.”

“Well, woo-hoo for you there, buddy,” she turned to me and extended a thumb. She immediately went back to her ritual of interchanging views between the monitor and the laptop. The next three hours passed in silence before Amy threw the clapped together computer in her pink Hello Kitty backpack and left without another word, just like she did every day.
 

An hour later, the floor was empty. The police scanners continually announced their presence by a series of chirps, whirs, and purrs. The wall of screens hummed blue and green to the left, showing various different positions on the Beltway. You could change the view to full color by using a browser on the computers. I preferred the old fashioned way.
 

The phone rang, “Traffic Center.”

“Yeah, we got some pretty heavy traffic on the Frederick Douglass Bridge, gotta be an accident or something.”
 

“Inbound or outbound bridge?”

“What?”

“Going into the city or leaving it?”

“What city?”

“DC.”

“Look man, I have been sitting here forever. Someone should get fired for this. We’ve been parked here for...oh wait. Hey, never mind we’re moving again.”

“Thanks for listening.” I put my headphones on and listened to the anchors banter back and forth.
 

“Greg Harris in the traffic center.”

I gave the report, the same one I would be giving for hours. The anchor thanked me and I sat feeling content. This was much better than the night before. It felt smooth and calm, like operating a machine, churning out reports and reading information about planned future construction sites.

I was back to the same routine and the euphoria of still having a job melted away, while the sour awful feeling of still having this job remained. It was back to mind-numbing monotony. I got up and walked to the Richmond studio once an hour. I did the same for the Norfolk studio. The room itself the same as it had ever been, bathed in florescent light that reflected off linoleum and coarse carpet, broken up only by worn bulbs here and there that would flash and blink.
 

I sat back down at the Washington computer and clicked the browser open. A red dialog suggested attention and I squinted at the words displayed, “Disabled vehicle, I-495 @ Old Georgetown Rd. Inner Loop. Lane 2.” Lane 2…that meant the second lane from the left. The lanes on any highway are numbered with the left one starting first. My mood brightened for a moment, something to do.
 

The Capital Beltway is an imperfect circle that goes around the city. Originally competed in 1964, it was
 
redesigned several times to cope with the exploding population. On the West side, it’s a winding mass of hills, malls, trees and the American Legion Bridge. On the East side there are fewer trees but there is a stadium, Andrews Air Force Base and the highway that takes you to Annapolis. In morning and afternoon hours the road is a miserable clogged nightmare that never moves. Drivers get caught in a herd of melded metal that fart exhaust and heat for hours on end. If you’re lucky, you may eventually get to your destination. If it snows, you’ll most likely sleep where you stop.
 

The Beltway on the overnight was a dangerous calm. Cars freed of their gridlock cages could travel at incredible speeds, taking the turns on the empty, construction free lanes with abandon. Drivers use to commuting through a parking lot had the chance to feel like an F-1 racer.
 

The scanner beeped and spoke the same warning as the computer. “We got a disabled. Lane 2 after Old Georgetown on the Inner.”

I looked at the Old Georgetown camera. There it was but it was before Old Georgetown. It was a white car with some murky forms moving inside it, too dark to make out. You could see the small car clearly, the area behind it a curtain of black.
 

I tapped the keyboard and entered the disabled vehicle. I stared at the computer in front of me, reviewing the report. As happy as I had been at first to be at work, I began to think again about the isolation and the monotony grinding me down. I pushed this away as I pulled on my headphones just in time.

“Greg Harris in the Traffic Center.”
 

Chimes, I started speaking. “There’s a new report of a disabled vehicle on the Inner loop of the Beltway, right before you reach Old Georgetown road. The second lane from the left is blocked. Elsewhere on the Beltway through Maryland and the Woodrow Wilson bridge things are quiet...” I exhaled as I finished the report. I wondered if this would be the rest of my days, forever isolated in this dark room on the fifteenth floor of a nondescript building in Silver Spring.
 

I clicked the address bar in the browser and typed in Craig's list. I had used the site many times when I was in between rooms to rent. I clicked around, searching for some distraction, something that would calm me. I looked through the parts of the site that were selling ‘relaxation’. There were ads for massages and pictures of women missing key articles of clothing. Looking at the pictures, I felt a little warm down below. It had been a long time. A really, really, long time. It was far before the days I worked at the traffic center, the last time a woman had been intimate with me. I didn't really think about such things anymore but the thought certainly qualified as a distraction, a great distraction. I thought about calling one of these places, one of the massage ones.
 

I was looking at a photo of a woman with her lady parts hanging heavy out of a barely there dress when the phone rang. I stared at the picture, a smile on my face, the sound of the phone a distant annoyance that could not break my concentration on more important matters. The phone rang again, refusing to be ignored, and I picked it up with an absent hand. “Traffic Center,” I said with a grin.

“Hey, I am coming out of Virginia and my radio is messed up. Do I have anything ahead of me?”
 

In another picture, a woman with long brown hair and brown eyes was licking her fingers.

“Hello?” said the person on the phone.

“Yes?” I asked, still in a daze.

“I’m on the Beltway. Anything up ahead?”

“Where are you going?”

“I said I’m on 66 about to get on the Inner.”
 

“No, you are good near 66.”
 

“Okay, thanks.”
 

I hung up the phone. The ad said that the payment for the massage would be 200 roses. Roses were at least four dollars each, so I knew I couldn’t afford that. I started clicking around for a better deal.
 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something flat white on the screens, reflecting all of the light from the street lamps overhead. It was a large 18 wheel tractor trailer driving fast out of Virginia on the Inner Loop of the Beltway. It was alone on the road with nothing but pavement ahead. It occurred to me that it was the same person I talked to on the phone.

Driving this early in the morning was a strategy. It was just after 3:30 AM, the time when the trucks that are prohibitively huge start going, so as to give everyone as much space as possible, and to make good time. The truck went quickly across the American Legion Bridge, clearly speeding. Truck drivers do anything they can to avoid the Beltway before rush hour. I wished, standing there watching it go, that I would have told the guy about the disabled vehicle that was sitting in the second lane to the left, especially considering he was traveling at such a high rate of speed.
 

 
I looked at the disabled vehicle in the Old Georgetown camera. It showed no signs of moving. I looked back at the truck, speeding past on the Inner Loop of the Beltway. I started shouting at the screen and wildly waving my arms.

I said a silent prayer that the truck would take 270. The truck leaned to the right and continued, passing 270 and heading straight for the disabled car. It merged and picked up more speed, the metal on its sides looked like they shook from the effort exerted by the engine. The monitors had no sound but I could almost hear the giant gears shifting.
 

I dove at the phone, I pushed * and 6 and 9. I listened to the tone ‘this feature has been disabled…’, and I hung up. All I could do was watch.

The truck continued fast, the leaves shook when it passed. It’s that moment that I never forget. I stared at the screens as the truck approached the car, it was like a countdown. The driver clearly gassed the engine when it pulled into the straight stretch after I-270. I watched in horror as the truck started drifting to the left, then drove into lane 2, directly at the unlit obstacle in its path.
 

In the movies this is where the hero swoops in and saves everybody. That’s not what happened here.

 
Whenever it plays in my head, which it often does, I see it drawn out, measured in hours instead of the mere seconds that elapsed. When you see a thing like that, time and space get distorted to allow every horror to be examined.
 

In the camera, you could see the car stopped, and behind it the curtain of black. Then the truck came out of the darkness, like a great green sea monster emerging from a lake of oil, it looked gigantic compared to the hopeless and helpless tiny compact passenger car in front of it. Puffs of smoke spat from the two front tires as the driver cut the wheel, desperate to avoid the impact.