08 September 2003

It is a gray Monday. The sun is rising later and later and it is cool on the balcony. The President had addressed the Nation last night, and I watched him with curiosity, sound on mute. The radio was filled with commentary about what he had said, the new commitment to operations against Terror in Iraq. It is better to meet the enemy in his neighborhood, thay claimed the President said, rather than meet him in our own. Which was interesting, considering the fact that the Anniversary is coming up this week and we had an Event over the weekend. The building is still buzzing about the real-life police drama, and I got into it with Mrs. Hitler, chairman of the Finance Committee of the Building. Mrs. Hitler isn't her real name, since not even the Fuhrer would have asked for her hand, even when he was on top of his game.

Mrs. Hitler is one-woman strike force for order and discipline. She is a big Nordic woman with a thick mane of blonde hair that cries out for braids and a bosom the demands silver armor. My first encounter with her was a few months after I arrived at The Big Pink Building where I live. I was listening to my little transistor radio by the pool. The Lifeguard was listening to one as I signed in, and I set up camp at the table under the yellow umbrella as far away from anyone as you can get and still be inside the fence. I was listening happily, reading, when a strident voice called out from the other side of the sparkling blue water.

"That is not permitted here. You must wear headphones!" It was her, of course, the Valkyrie right out of a Wagnerian Opera, intent on her mission of enforcing the rules. All the rules. I put on my earphones and waved in a desultory manner. Only owners can attend the meetings and vote on the rules, of course, and it is a constant challenge to keep the residents who have sub-let the units under control and in good order. We are only a step away from anarchy.

I noticed thereafter that she was in the middle of everything at the Building, from the opening Pool Party on Memorial Day right through the building-wide rummage sale in early October. I made a point of staying out of her way. But I have assumed a higher profile in the closed circuit of life of the Building since I decided to buy one of the units down by the pool. I am dangerously near being able to attend the meetings and vote and everything. I know she knows all about it. She knows everything. Between her and Jack, the cigar-smoking septuagenarian Lothario they have the book on all of us.

I got back to the unit around eight-fifteen on Saturday night. It had been a long day of chores and cleaning and I enjoyed the order I had re-established in the little apartment. I went out on my balcony to smoke and look at the niht sky. The moon was bright and Mars still provides a dramatic presence in the evening sky. But my attention was diverted immediately by what was happening five floors below. There were white police cruisers lined up abreast all down the service drive, completely blocking it. Two were abreast right in front of the canopy that covers the approach to the main entrance. One of them had big numbers on the top- "47." The others might have belonged to supervisors. I could count seven official vehicles and there were lights flashing down the drive to the west and officers walking around with some urgency. I saw one stout officer with an evidence bag filled with something. I couldn't see what. He was wearing blue disposable gloves.

Arlington is good on response. They are speedy and professional. They came to the Pentagon on that awful day, it being in their jurisdiction.

There was clearly something going on, and it was far better than television. I smoked a couple cigarettes, watching the occupants of the civilian sedan exchange some heated words with the police and screech off backwards. Other cars belonging to residents approached the cluster of police cruisers and stopped, confused. This is not a common occurrence at the Big Pink Building. I could only see clearly down immediately below. The trees blocked the view to the right and left. I watched the red lights winking through the leaves and then there was a commotion to my left. A slim figure appeared, handcuffed, and was gently placed face first on the dirt next to the ornamental flowers on the Route 50 side of the service drive. The police patted him down and left him like that, treating him carefully and all of them wearing the blue disposable gloves. After a few minutes they loaded him into the squad car horizontally, like a sack of grain.

In about fifteen minutes they were all gone and the night returned to silence and the whoosh of fast-movers on the six-lanes to the south..

I decided to roller-blade early Sunday morning since I had to go to the office and work on a proposal. I stopped at the front desk to ask what had happened. Carol was on. She had the morning shift and said she didn't know, though it was clear that she wanted to talk. I asked her what it said in the logbook and she pulled the red leather journal out of a little cubbie behind the desk. She opened to the last page and said "Ivory had the desk last night. She called the police around eight o'clock. There were young men breaking into cars. A Resident came in and told Ivory and then went out again and they were breaking the window on the car he just parked. They called 911 right then."

"Really?" I said. "I had better go check out my car and my truck." I was a little concerned. I don't drive the truck much since it is a classic and I want to keep the miles off of it. But it is a desirable little rocket with very expensive tires. I turned to walk out the back , but the words continued to flow out of Carol. I turned and listened sympathetically. If the windows were smashed or the tires stolen a few minutes wasn't going to make any difference. Carol told me about the sounds in the night, the groups of men who occupied little crannies over on the church grounds across the road, the taunts and the whistles when she walked to her car late at night. The desk is manned twenty-four seven, so she pulled her time in the hours when the powers of darkness are exalted. Our spacious campus is home to many young men who flee the heat and closeness of the little garden apartments that adjoin our grounds, and Carol and the other women who work the desk are afraid. They hear the murmuring in other languages in the cloak of darkness.

I hadn't thought about it and assumed that things were OK. It is the difference between men and women, one of them, anyway, to see the world as a target. I made a sympathetic remark and walked out to check my fleet. Both were OK. I put on my blades and skated around to the front of the building. The only trace I could find of anything untoward was a pair of blue disposable gloves. I worked up a sweat and then went to the office. When I came back they were talking about it at the pool, a group of women very concerned.

We were still talking about it after I cooked dinner and went down to plunge in the cool water before the guard closed it down. There is one week and one weekend to go, and I will be traveling on the Anniversary of when the nation lost its innocence. I was talking to the guard when Mrs. Hitler swept up the walkway. I asked her if she had heard about the incident, goading her a bit.

"I chair the Finance Committee and our night security is in good order. We have an unobtrusive presence on the grounds that is adequate. We have not had an incident in five years and the man who was arrested here last week did not struggle as he was removed. People gossip here too much." She made a disparaging comment about immigrants and cut it short, realizing the guard was half-Persian and was often mistaken for one of the Hispanics from the apartment complex next door.

"Well," I said "I have twenty-seen years of military experience and unobtrusive is not the way to go." Unobtrusive seemed to me to be a code word for "resources." It is about money, after all. More guards or a visible presence is going to cost money and make the fees go up. This Building is nearing forty years old and there are creakings in the good bones of the pink brick.

"As a renter, your opinion is not relevant."

"I'll fix that" I said and she rushed away, probably to scold the desk for rumor-mongering. I held back long enough that I did not have to ride the elevator up with her. I was stewing on her remark. Valkyrie or not, she was at least volunteering her time to keep the place afloat. She gave of her own time to make things better, just the way the President has asked us al to volunteer. Maybe I will too, when I am an owner and can go to the meetings. It just doesn't seem to be enough to hold back the tide of humanity that had swept over Arlington. The claustrophobic little apartments with way too many people in them. It was a challenge to keep order on the grounds of this Big Pink Building, to keep the campus placid in the night.

When I got up to the apartment the President was on the TV. I hit the mute button and watched his lips move. I heard the next morning that the theme of the address was Sept. 11, which the President said ought not to happen again. It was a reason, he said, to stay the course in Iraq.

"For America, there will be no going back to the era before September the 11th, 2001, to false comfort in a dangerous world," he said. "We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception of weakness." The "surest way" to avoid attacks on Americans, the President said, "is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans" so that "we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities."

I turned it off when his lips stopped moving. They are already here, Mr. Bush. And the $88 billion he is gong to request to stabilize Iraq doesn't begin to address that.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra