tray, and tried not to hold up the line. Searching for a seat, he caught the man with the white beard watching him. Everyone in the facility seemed to think Troy was in charge, but Troy wasn’t fooled. He was just another person doing a job, following a script. Sometimes, he wondered if anyone sat at the end of the line or if it was all a big circle of confusion.
He found an empty spot facing the view. Unlike that first day, it didn’t bother him to see out. He found it comforting. He remembered a man crying on the lift that same day, wondered if that fellow was feeling better now.
A scoop of potatoes and gravy washed away the bitter taste of the pill. Mere water was never up to the task. Eating methodically, he watched the sun set on the first week of his first shift. Twenty-five more weeks to go. It was a countable number. It felt much shorter than half a year. Switching to days, he had one hundred seventy-six remaining. That seemed like a lot. How one framed things really mattered.
An older gentleman sat down diagonally across from him, polite enough to not block the view. Troy recognized the man, had spoken with him once by the recycling bin. When the gentleman looked up, Troy nodded in greeting.
They ate.
The cafeteria hummed with a pleasant sound. Plastic, glass, and metal beat a rhythmless tune. A few hushed conversations rose and faded. Troy spent a lot of time gazing past the rotting debris and up at the hills.
Breakfast and dinner were his favorite hours. Lunch was delivered to his office, which left him trapped in the middle of the building. He didn’t like the middle. There was nothing calling to him there. It was a place of being torn between two longings—the hard-to-define urge to unbury himself in the cafeteria, and a darker beckoning that called to him from below.
There were things he was supposed to know, but he kept forgetting. He awoke each morning with them in his vision, could feel memories taking shape, but by breakfast they were fading. By dinner, they were dull aches. It left Troy with a general sadness, a cold sensation, and a feeling like a hollow stomach—different from hunger—like rainy days as a child when he didn’t know what to do with his time. It was the pain of a chronic boredom mixed with the discomfort of time wasted.
He scraped the last of his potatoes off his tray. The gentleman across from him slid over a little and cleared his throat. Troy glanced up and slid the potatoes off the fork with his teeth, his arms erupting in gooseflesh from the sound and taste of metal scraping on enamel.
The old man smiled. “Things going okay?” he asked.
He reminded Troy of someone. Blotchy skin hung slightly loose around his face. He had the drooping neck, that pinch of flesh hanging from his Adam’s apple that made old people look like they were melting.
“What things?” Troy asked. He returned the smile and looked back to his plate. The knife was superfluous. Hardly any weight with the edge of his fork, and an unnatural bite of turkey slid off from the rest.
“Anything, I suppose. Just checking in. I go by Hal.” The gentleman lifted his glass. Troy did the same. It was as good as a handshake.
“Troy,” he said. He supposed to some people it still mattered what they called themselves.
Hal took a long pull from his glass. His neck bobbed, the gulp loud. Self-conscious, Troy took a small sip and worked on the last of his beans and turkey.
“I’ve noticed some people sit facing it and some sit with their backs to it.” Hal jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
Troy looked up at the screen. He chewed his food, didn’t say anything.
“I reckon those who sit and watch, there’s something they’re trying to remember.”
Troy froze. He swallowed and forced himself to shrug.
“And some of us who don’t want to see, I figure we’re trying our best to forget.”
Troy swallowed the last of his water, had rationed poorly. He still had a few bites of beans left. Something told him they shouldn’t be having this conversation.
“It’s the bad stuff,” Hal said, staring off toward the elevators. “Have you noticed that? It’s just the bad stuff that slips away. Anything that don’t matter all that much just sits there.”
Troy jabbed his beans even though he didn’t plan on eating them.
“It makes you wonder, don’t it?”
Looking up at the screen, Troy saw that the hills were almost invisible. They were turning the same color of darkness as the evening and cloud-filled sky.
“Makes you wonder why we all feel so rotten inside.” Hal took a bite of his potatoes.
Troy watched the man chew, jowls quivering. He eventually scraped the green beans off his fork, looked down at them, then jabbed them a second time.
7
Donald was glad he had decided to walk to his meeting with the Senator. The rain from the week before had finally let up, and the traffic in Dupont Circle was at a crawl. As he skirted the park and left Johns Hopkins behind— the sidewalks there packed with young men and women in scrubs, both hands wrapped around their Starbucks—he saw in the circle’s traffic a metaphor for the city.
Ten streets to choose from, ten routes colliding without compromise. There was the honking and the shaking of fists, no one willing to merge. The tourists were trapped in the inner lanes; they went around and around and got nowhere. Here was Washington encapsulated as far as Donald was concerned. It was as though he had the same two choices: he could spin in circles, completely lost and doing little, or he could dive down one avenue and forsake the others, always fearing he’d picked poorly. So far, he had tended toward the latter with few regrets.
A taxi driver close to the curb laid on his horn. These were like the lobbyists in Rayburn, the real experts who knew the backstreets. They probably wished these tourists would just vanish so they could get around without all the delays.
Heading up Connecticut and leaning into a stiffening breeze, Donald wondered why his meeting with the Senator had been moved to Kramer’s Bookshop of all places. There were a dozen superior coffee joints half the distance away.
He crossed a side street and hurried up the short flight of stone steps to the bookshop. The front door to Kramer’s was one of those ancient wooden affairs older establishments hung like a boast, like a testament to their endurance. He pushed it open and ducked inside as a fresh gust blew grit and fluttering trash down Connecticut Avenue.
Hinges squeaked and actual bells jangled overhead. Donald wiped his feet on the welcome mat and turned to close the door behind him—an act as foreign and quaint as it might feel to eat with one’s hands. The bells jangled a second time as the top of the door knocked into them, and a young woman straightening books on a center table of bestsellers glanced up and smiled hello.
The cafe, Donald saw, was packed with men and women in business suits, white porcelain cups rising and falling, an espresso machine releasing a deathly wail as it steamed someone’s milk. He returned the warm smile as the bookseller continued arranging the hardbacks. There was no sign of the Senator in the cafe. Donald started to check his phone, see if he was too early, when a Secret Service agent caught his eye.
The agent stood broad-shouldered at the end of an aisle of physical books in the small corner of Kramer’s that had not yet succumbed to the cafe. Donald laughed at how conspicuously hidden the man was. Their ilk seemed to get a kick out of dressing up overly normal and then flashing their earpieces, the bulges by their ribs, and the ubiquitous sunglasses. Skirting the table of bestsellers, Donald headed the agent’s way, admiring the wide planks underfoot that chased him with the squeaks and groans of age.
There was an irrational urge to hold his hands up in submission as he approached the agent. Donald had been around a few who came across as twitchy. The agent’s gaze shifted his way, but it was hard to tell if he was looking at Donald or just generally toward the front door.
“I’m here to see Senator Thurman,” he said, his voice cracking a little. “I have an appointment.”
The agent turned his head to the side. Donald followed the gesture and peered down an aisle of books to see
