Now Hear This
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Now, Hear This I am not dying. I am pretty sure of that, though unfortunately, it is not necessarily a good thing. I’m not whining. Everybody gets sick at least once a winter, and with the kids grown, there is not the multiple colds and illness transferred home from school. But with what is abroad out there in the wild world, I though I am doing something I never did in my government career. I am staying home until I am no longer infectious. My bones ache, and the chills rattle my spine, and when I am not shivering, I am sweating through my pull-over. I know it is the flu, or something like it, and the fact that it has not killed me within 36 hours of onset means it is probably not the deadly avian variant, H5N1. I have been resolute about keeping any birds out of my areas of Big Pink, though I have no idea what some of those people on the 6th floor are doing. I don’t exclude Santoria rituals, not that there is anything wrong with it, but with the bird-thing I am understandably wary. The only fowl I permit in the residence are those that have been rendered into chicken soup. It must have been the chill weather that nailed me last week, running around town without my heavy coat. Today, now that I am generating my own chill, the temperature has popped up into the low sixties. I spent the afternoon sprawling on the Murphy bed, under the comforter, listening to incomprehensible conference calls from the office on the speaker phone. At some point, I poked my head out. It seemed warmer outside than it did within. I shivered, and then realized there was a sound rolling over the neighborhood. It was a little like the beeping that accompanies a truck backing up, but different. It had a lower pitch, and I could tell through my congested hears that it seemed to be coming from a variety of directions. I listened for a while, as the noise cycled through a variety of intervals and pacing. There seemed to be another tone imbedded in the louder one, lower in pitch. My legs hurt and I thought I would lay down again. I squirmed into the comforter, trying to get warm and isolate my aching joints. The sound had not been like the old civil defense sirens. Those were scary, and they meant that missiles were coming. But that is what I think the strange tones were, the new notification system for Arlington County that something bad was happening. I heard in passing that local authorities in Arlington were going to start experimenting with warning sirens to alert citizens of impending threats. The concept is the same as the old one, from World War Two and the Cold War, but I liked these sounds better. They did not imply that somebody’s military action was impending, and they were not nearly as jarring as the loudspeaker on an aircraft carrier that boomed out �Now hear this!� As if you had a choice. The new sounds were more like the chimes on the Metro, telling you the doors were going to close on the train. I might have dropped off for a while, I don’t know. The day was surrounded by a penumbra of ache, and the sounds did not penetrate the thick concrete flanks of the building. I remember the last time I heard the old sirens, and I thought about it in the fog. I was coming back from one of the Bunkers, the ones that remind you viscerally about how real the treat from the heavens was considered back in the day. The old forts had mostly gone to sleep, or been abandoned over the years, but 9/11 brought them new life. Before retiring, I was motoring through a hamlet in one of the states around here, and the sirens on the telephone poles began to wail. I pulled over to the curb, looking around, stabbing at the radio to find the news channel. There was nothing there, and presently the sirens stopped. The locals are probably used to it. But we have not had the sirens sounded here in years. I think it is a good idea to be able to reach out to citizens who are walking the dog, or shopping, or waiting at a bus stop. So I am a little surprised that they were experimenting today. They say there will be attention-getting wails, but that is not what I heard today. Maybe I am wrong, and maybe it was just a squadron of dump-trucks backing up all around me. Maybe it is just flu dementia. When I came out of my slumber, the radio was saying that a new tape was playing on Al Jazeera, this one from Osama’s two guy, Ayman al- Zawahri. The radio said he was dressed in white robes with a white turban. They say he looked angry. He said he had survived the air strike targeting him earlier this month, and said he would meet his fate as set by God, not by the President, and he was going to hit us. No kidding. I took some drugs that are supposed to promote sinus draining. I think it means the Bad Guys are getting desperate. They say the production values were pretty good, and that means it will be easier to figure out where it was done. It has got to be hard, I thought, living from minute to minute, without sirens to warn of impending attack. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |
