She offered me a lozenge, asked where I’d been, curious about the cough I’d picked up. I was too miserable for in-flight pleasantries. “A funeral,” I said flatly. “I’m sorry,” she said and shifted in her seat to allow me more of the cramped space we were forced to share. “My father’s,” I added, obliged by her kindness not to withdraw too rudely into silence. “I’m very sorry,” she said. There was a moment of awkwardness. I leaned my head against the window, and she returned to her book. My coughing persisted. I tried my best to muffle it, but without much success. Later in the flight, she turned to me and said, “Grief often settles in the lungs.” Then she told me about her work in Bo-sina. I remember little about what she said except that she was convinced that my cough was directly connected to the death of my father. She rejected my observation that the loss paled by comparison with the tragedy of Bosnia. I’ll never know who she was, but I have her to thank for the insight into how strangely grief settles and unsettles us. I was still thinking about her and what she’d said to me as I walked above Canal Road a few days after I returned home. It was twilight, the afterglow of a brilliant sunset. I had been walking on the C&O Canal and was returning to my car, parked on Potomac Street, which runs along a ridge of the palisades overlooking the river. It is one of my favorite spots, a quiet residential street with an eclectic variety of houses on one side and clear views across the river to Virginia. In autumn, the colors are spectacular. At one end, a path leads down a wooded embankment onto an old railroad bridge that crosses the canal at Arizona Avenue, part of the old Georgetown Branch Rail Line that once connected Georgetown and Chevy Chase. In the early 1970s, the bridge was a rusting, graffiti-covered structure with a clear drop through the tracks to the road. Teenagers went there to smoke pot and run around in the woods. Now it is a restored and heavily bicycled part of the Crescent Trail, which links Georgetown with Bethesda and Silver Spring.
I’d just come up the trail from the bridge, was standing on the embankment for a last look at the pulsing sunset, when I heard the distinctive whoosh-click of a golf ball being hit. It wasn’t a light chip shot but the solid crack of an earnest drive. In the vanishing daylight, I could make out a figure. He bent down, placed a ball on the tee, straightened, and after a brief pause—crack—launched another ball. I glanced at the long stream of cars just below on Canal Road. Another ball was hit, a little less solidly this time, followed by a hoarsely muttered “Fuck!”
The man ignored me, went through the whole pantomime, wriggling hips and flexing shoulders. Just as I was about to interrupt, he drew back and—whoosh-click—the ball disappeared into the darkness.
“Don’t you think that’s a little dangerous?”
He set another ball on the tee without so much as a glance in my direction.
“Hey!” I called.
He relaxed his grip and turned to me with an expression of forced calm. He was well over six feet tall, with bunched athletic shoulders and a neatly trimmed goatee. His hair was cropped short, and he wore a red Washington Nationals baseball cap. My heart was thumping. “There’s a busy road down there. You could cause an accident.”
“You know what this is?” He held the club up, pointed to its absurdly outsized metal head. “Big Bertha. Titanium cup face, carbon composite body. Named after a forty-three-ton mobile howitzer. I can drive a ball three hundred yards with this sucker. Wanna try?”
I shook my head.
“Go ahead,” he urged, as if my anger was priggish and unjustified. “The gun was named for Adolph Krupp’s wife. It was fired for the first time on August 12, 1914, outside Liege. Took sixty seconds for the shell to travel the distance. Over nine miles. Then, boom! Fuckin’ World War I.” It was dark now except for the glow of traffic below and a single streetlight farther up the road.
“The canal down there is a national park. I’m sure there’s a law against littering it with golf balls.”
“Who are you? The neighborhood watch?” He shook his head and yanked the tee out of the ground. Muttering, he stalked off.
I remained for a while, feeling as if I’d somehow earned rights to the spot. An airplane descended overhead, following the Potomac down to the airport. Across the river and through the trees, I could see traffic moving along the George Washington Parkway. Like many who call D.C. home, I am not from here but of here. I am not from anywhere, really, and yet I call this city home. It’s a strange triangulation of geography, psychology, and fate and makes for great confusion, a confusion that calls for—no, demands—a map. Or many maps since, in cartography, a true one-to-one correspondence is impossible. The moment we begin to apply scale, we distort and alter our relationship to the world. Finally, I got into the car and drove home, listening on the radio as NPR reported on a missile strike against a Taliban guerrilla leader in Helmand Province.
George Washington Memorial Parkway
38°55’16.60”N
77° 6’33.17”W
Noel Leonard works at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center, or DIAC, a complex of metal and glass blocks on Bolling Air Force Base surrounded by acres of mowed grass where the Anacostia flows into the Potomac. A new annex was built a few years ago, a sweeping brown glass facade with views downriver to Alexandria. Although it is joined to the old building, the new building stands apart physically and architecturally, as if it bears no relation. Noel’s office is in the older, silver-skinned building. When the elevator doors slide open and he steps off every morning with that airy little puff of arrival, it is always as though he has temporarily exchanged identities with someone other than himself, a completely familiar alter ego who inhabits his body and will be buried in the same tomb with him, along with the details of the top-secret work he does for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which employs him to analyze data beamed down from satellites to create vivid and detailed maps and portraits of events on Earth.
His office is deep in the interior of the building behind cipher doors. It has no windows. At the end of the corridor is a large window with a panoramic view of the city. He pauses there from time to time to remind himself where he is. He can see the domes of the Capitol and the Library of Congress, the Washington Monument. On the hilltop in the distance is the National Cathedral. In the foreground are Haines Point and East Potomac Park, where he often plays golf; Fort McNair, the National War College, and the brand-new Nationals’ baseball stadium. Immediately in front is the Anacos-tia Naval Air Station, where the president’s helicopters are parked in an enormous hangar surrounded by double rows of high-security fencing. The president always travels in convoys of three, a pea hidden in one of the identically marked VH-3D Sikorsky Sea King shells.
It is snowing. A soft white blanket is coming down gently on the city and on the sprawling lawns of the air base. It has coated the three white radar orbs of the Naval Research Laboratory, the wings and fuselage of the F-105 Thunderchief that ornaments the traffic circle just inside the main entrance, Foley’s Folly. Noel enjoys the incongruous quiet of the base. Falling snow makes everything feel ordinary, and life seem simple. Standing at the window, he is reminded of the famous photograph of Kennedy silhouetted against a window in the Oval Office, concentrated power invisibly served by bureaucrats and technicians staring intently at their computer screens—which is exactly what Noel is doing when Geoff Cowper, his first-level supervisor, comes into his office late in the afternoon. Cowper closes the door with conspiratorial gentleness. “It was a school,” he says hoarsely.
“A school?”
“Investigation under way, but basically, we already know everything.” He bounces against the door, holding the knob behind his back with both hands.
“A real school? With kids?”
A shrug.
“How many?”
Another shrug.
“Fuck!”
The light in the office is low. Noel prefers the incandescence of table lamps to high fluorescence overhead. In the corner is a light table for studying transparencies and a bank of high-res monitors. He leaves the light table on as a reminder that