boulevard spilled every which way. Nauseated, he staggered into a blare of car horns. He fought the terrifying sense of open space. Through a tiny aperture of tunnel vision, he struggled to a wall bathed in sunlight.
'Get off, you,' a Hindi accent scolded him. Then the shopkeeper saw his face and retreated back inside.
Ike laid his cheek against the brick. 'Eighteenth and C streets,' he begged a passerby. It was a woman in heels. Her staccato abruptly hurried in a wide arc around him. Ike forced himself away from the wall.
Across the street, he began the awful climb up a hillock girdled by American flags at
full mast. He lifted his head to find the Washington Monument gutting the sheer blue belly of day. It was the cherry blossom season, that was evident. He could barely breathe for the pollen.
A flock of clouds drifted overhead, gave mercy, then vanished. The sunlight was terrible. He moved on, flesh hot. Tulips shattered his vision with their musket fire of brilliant colors. The gym bag in his hand – his sole luggage – grew heavy. He was panting for air, and that stung his old pride, a Himalayan mountaineer in such a state at sea level.
Eyes squeezed tight behind his dark glacier glasses, Ike retreated to an alley with shade. At last the sun sank. His nausea lifted. He could bare his eyes. He roamed the darkest parts of the city by moonlight, urgent as a fugitive.
No prowling for him. He raced pell-mell. This was his first night aboveground since he was snowbound in Tibet long ago. No time to eat. Sleep could wait. There was everything to see.
Like a tourist with the thighs of an Olympic sprinter, he plunged tirelessly. There were ghettos and Parisian boulevards and bright restaurant districts and august gated embassies. Those he dodged, holding to the emptier places.
The night was gorgeous. Even dimmed by urban lights, the stars sprayed overhead. He breathed the brackish tidal air. Trees were budding.
It was April, all right. And yet, as he hurtled across the grass and pavement and leaped over fences and dodged cars, Ike felt only November in his soul. The night's very mercy condemned him. He was not long for this world, he knew. And so he memorized the moon and the marshes and the ganged oaks and the braid of currents on the slow Potomac.
He did not mean to, but he came upon the National Cathedral atop a lawned hill. It was like falling into the Dark Ages. An entrenched mob of thousands of faithful occupied the grounds, their squalid tent city unlit except for candles or lanterns. Ike hesitated, then went forward. It was obvious that families and whole congregations had come here and were living side by side with the poor and insane and sick and addicted.
Flying buttresses dangled huge Crusade-like banners with a red cross, and the twin Gothic towers flickered in the cast of great bonfires. There wasn't a cop in sight. It was as if the cathedral had been relinquished to the true believers. Peddlers hawked crucifixes, New Age angels, blue-green algae pills, Native American jewelry, animal parts, bullets sprinkled with holy water, and round-trip air travel to Jerusalem on charter jets.
A militia was signing up volunteers – 'muscular Christians' for guerrilla strikes on hell. The muster table was piled with literature and Soldier of Fortune magazines, and manned by frauds with Gold's Gym biceps and expensive guns. A cheap training video showed Sunday-school flames and actors made up as damned souls pleading for help.
Right beside the TV stood a woman missing one arm and both her breasts, naked to the waist, daring them with her scars like glory. Her accent was Pentecostal, maybe Louisiana, and in her one hand she held a poisonous snake. 'I was a captive of the devils,' she was testifying. 'But I was rescued. Only me, though, not my poor children, nor all the other good Christians down deeper in the House. Good Christians in need of righteous salvation. Go down, you brothers with strong arms. Bring up the weak. Carry the light of the Lord into that Stygian dark. Take the spirit of Jesus, and of the Father, and the Holy Spirit....'
Ike backed away. How much was that snake woman being paid to show her flesh and proselytize and recruit these gullible men? Her wounds looked suspiciously like surgery scars, possibly from a double mastectomy. Regardless, she did not speak like a former captive. She was too certain of herself.
To be sure, there were human captives among the hadals. But they were not necessarily in need of rescue. The ones Ike had seen, the ones who had survived for any length of time among the hadals, tended to sound like a sum of zero. But once you'd been there, limbo could mean a kind of asylum from your own responsibilities. It was heresy to speak aloud, especially among liberty-preaching patriots like these tonight, but Ike himself had felt the forbidden rapture of losing himself to another creature's authority.
Ike made his way up the steps dense with humanity and entered the medieval transept. There were touches of the twentieth century: the floor was inlaid with state seals, and one stained-glass window bore the image of astronauts on the moon. Otherwise he might have been passing through the crest of a Black Plague. The air was filled with smoke and incense and the smell of unwashed bodies and rotten fruit, and the stone walls echoed with prayers. Ike heard the Confiteor blend with the Kaddish. Appeals to Allah mixed with Appalachian hymns. Preachers railed about the Second Coming, the Age of Aquarius, the One True God, angels. The petition was general. The millennium wasn't turning out to be much fun, it seemed.
Before dawn, mindful of his debt to Branch, he returned to 18th and C streets, Northwest, where he had been told to report. He sat at one end of the granite steps and waited for nine o'clock. Despite his premonitions, Ike told himself there could be no turning back. His honor had come down to a matter of the mercy of strangers.
The sun arrived slowly, advancing down the canyon of office buildings like an imperial march. Ike watched his footprints melt in the lawn's frost. His heart sank at the erasure.
An overwhelming sadness swept him, a sense of deep betrayal. What right did he have to come back into the World? What right did the World have to come back into him? Suddenly his being here, trying to explain himself to strangers, seemed like a terrible indiscretion. Why give himself away? What if they judged him guilty?
For an instant, in his mind a small lifetime, he was returned to his captivity. It had no single image. A great howl. The feel of a mortally exhausted man's bones hard against his shoulder. The odor of minerals. And chains... like the edge of music, never quite in rhythm, never quite song. Would they do that to him again? Run, he thought.
'I didn't think you'd be here,' a voice spoke to him. 'I thought they would need to hunt you down.'
Ike glanced up. A very wide man, perhaps fifty years old, was standing on the sidewalk in front of him. Despite the neat jeans and a designer parka, his carriage said military. Ike squinted left and right, but they were alone. 'You're the lawyer?' he asked.
'Lawyer?'
Ike was confused. Did the man know him or not? 'For the court-martial. I don't know what you're called. My advocate?'
The man nodded, understanding now. 'Sure, you might call me that.'
Ike stood. 'Let's get it over with, then,' he said. He was full of dread, but saw no alternative to what was in motion.
The man seemed bemused. 'Haven't you noticed the empty streets? There's no one around. The buildings are all closed. It's Sunday.'
'Then what are we doing here?' he asked. It sounded foolish to him. Lost.
'Taking care of business.'
Ike coiled inside himself. Something wasn't right. Branch had told him to report here, at this time. 'You're not my lawyer.'
'My name is Sandwell.'
Ike could not fill the man's pause with any recognition. When the man realized Ike had never heard
