Vic Socotra

11 September 2008

Chance

It is The Day, of course.

The memory of it comes and goes, but it is always lurking I always think about it as I fill up the Hubrismobile with high-test at the Quarters K gas station. I can’t help it. It is right there in front of you, even if the Pentagon's façade has been renewed, and the gray limestone has weathered to the extent that you cannot tell precisely where the boundary of old and new begin.

The gas station is named for an old military residence that stood for years on what became the Pentagon Reservation, which of course was part of the Custis-Lee estate that was seized by the Federals to punish the Commanding General of the Insurrection. Arlington Cemetery and Fort Myer and the Defense Information Systems Agency are on it, too. It was a useful piece of real estate.

There have been two iterations of service stations on the property since, part of the Navy Exchange System that has confused generations of civilian motorists lost in the spaghetti of ring roads around the vast geometric building.

For several months the gas station was close as you could get to the jagged broken tooth of the Pentagon where the airplane went in.

That section of the bui lding was controlled as a crime scene almost before it ceased to be a search and rescue mission. It took months before it became a construction site and the guards were gone and you could sneak up to the blackened corridors that ended in mid-air and see the little men swarming over the replacement section rising from the sub-basements.

I had been on the road from the District to Langley that morning. I crossed the 14th Street Bridge with the top down. My uniformed friends were already at work, getting ready for the morning brief to the Brass, and the people from Army manpower and the comptroller’s shop at DIA were still inbound in the darkness.

I cut through the North Parking area of the big building, thinking possibly of grabbing a work-out at the POAC before jumping on the Parkway to spend my day at the Stepford Agency, where the nice well-scrubbed people march along the halls like the artificial housewives at the supermarket.

I had moved the contents of my desk up there from the Pentagon just four months earlier, so I was still very much between the worlds of the Iron Majors and the Stepford Spooks. I was always ambivalent about working there, but I'm glad to have had the experience, just in case I ever find myself sequestered in a strange land again.

It was at its very strangest that day, starting just before nine o’clock, and accelerating into the most disjointed years in the history of the Republic.

That sequence of events always runs through my mind at the gas station. They are going to dedicate the memorial on the Anniversary later this morning. I don’t have an invitation, and instead some meaningless meetings on which some people have been very insistent.

I suppose it will be better to go sometime when the crowds are gone and it will be easier to locate the benches dedicated to mark the memory of those we knew who perished in a sudden roar and darkness and fire.

After the gas station, I headed for the office in Ballston. There was a chance wreck on Washington Boulevard and that forced a bail-out into the neighborhood road grid.

I didn’t mind. It was a gorgeous day, almost exactly like the one when everything went crazy. I was thinking about what a crap shoot the whole thing is. Some poor chump did something dumb, and all the rest of us are stuck. One of the people I worked with on the Committee was trapped in the usual traffic going into town on Route 27, right next to the Pentagon heliport. The roar of jet engines overcame the radio and a shadow of something moving very fast blinked over her car.

On this random day, off the main drag, I was contemplating which way to go to the office, since I was off the main drag. maybe just go up to Park and take the back way, with only the uncontrolled intersections at George Mason and Carlin Springs to get across. But people drive so fast and pay so little attention to what they are doing.

I thought I would just take Henderson Road which runs near Big Pink despite the speed bumps, because the lights make it regular, if longer.

There was a lot to get done. There was an issue with a contract I have, which is fucked up for perfectly understandable reasons, and the matter of the fifty people the government needs to declassify documents.

It is a hurry-up deal, and necessary to support the legal proceed ings involving the detainees in Guantanamo. These are the guys we scooped up in Afghanistan right after The Day. The Supreme Court has decided that, they are entitled to the right of Habeas Corpus, and it has made a mess for the Department and an opportunity for the vendor community. Some of them are very bad men who will be happy to go back to killing Americans if they skate out of jail on a technicality.

Some of them are not, of course, and apparently we are prepared to let the guilty go away to protect against injustice. I don't know if the Court made a bad decision, but I certainly did about the route planning.

I was just coming up abeam of the display model town home in the development that has not taken off. The gigantic project that was the quid pro quo for the Paragon Construction Company’s destruction of the old Buckingham 1 and III blocks is coming along just fine. They have had a harder time attracting the millionaires in this market.

I always think a little about the microcosm of the economy when I go by there, since the Colonial-style apartment complex in between the two strips slated for the new rows of homes still stands inviolate, and that driveway- the very next one after the one to the luxury homes is where the gray truck was headed.

It took a millisecond to recognize what was happening.

It was one of those Toyota 4X4s that are so common in Buckingham. Not new, and larger in aspect than I normally recall as it crossed the centerline in a lazy arc, headed for the driveway. The Driver did not notice me as he commenced the turn, and only became aware of the Hubrismobile's onward movement as he presented a full beam aspect across my lane.

My foot went to the brake, of course, stabbing it as hard as I could as the yards turned to feet, then inches hope rising at the end-game that I might stop short. The truck was still moving, though and that hope ended as fast as the crisis began.

The adrenaline was just flooding my system as the Hubrismobile impacted the truck just aft of the front wheel-well. He could undoubtedly have heard me cursing, since the top was down, and the acoustics were excellent on this fine day at the end of the summer.

The airbag did not deploy, thank God, and the cigarette in my left hand was not pressed into my face and did not scar the crisp Brooks Brothers white shift, nor mar the colorful antique clip-on bow tie that graced my neck.

The truck suddenly lurched backward, pulling backwards from the impact area. The, scene was already compromised, so heart pounding, I pulled slowly to the curb. There could be jagged metal hanging near a tire, after all, but they tell you to clear the traffic lanes in a fender-bender, though what had happened would never be apparent from where the truck had gone.

I wondered for a moment if he was going to flee the scene, but he did not. He parked the truck in the driveway as I got to the front of the car, looking at the line of the hood to see if it had buckled.

The Germans are quite clever about the modular construction of their motorcars. In a head-on collision all the fine moving parts are intended to crumple in precise order to ensure the integrity of the passenger compartment. I got to the front of the vehicle and looked at it in wonder. The plastic of the bumper was discolored where it had stressed from the impact, but the license plate frame was intact. Nothing hanging loose, and without a careful survey I could not see if everything was still in-true.

The little man with the colorful ball cap was gesturing and saying something in Spanish. The phone was in my hand and the blood was roaring in my ears. 911, I thought, they should dispatch a cop and make the accident report. Leaning over and running my hands along the bumper I could see nothing to report. If there was damage, it was within the structure of the steel and plastic.

I turned and used some short Germanic phrases in response to the liquid Spanish, and waved him away in disgust.

Then I got in the car and sat for a moment. Across the street a fat man in an SUV was shouting into the phone about someone getting their ass over to the location, which I presumed was the one adjacent to where I sat. I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb, the micro drama over and went on to work.

It took a couple hours for the adrenaline to wash itself away, and I noticed on the way home that people were not driving very well. It was good to get home.

Maybe the storm surge had not fully passed through my synapses. I changed into sweats and sneakers, picked up the hand weights and left Big Pink. I headed off to the west, toward the dying sun.

There is traffic island over in Arlington Forest where the last rays of the day kiss the earth. It takes a minute or two to plod around it, raising left hand then right a thousand times. I got my shirt off, though I know it is futile to try to keep the good color of summer when the season is clearly dying.

You do what you can to fight against the inevitable. There is so much in life that is left completely to chance.

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