to him. Donât let him die. Or his son. His child! Donât let his son die. Iâm asking you.
She sank down and sat against the wall of the house, making the face of crying but not crying, just passing her hand over the ground at the edge of the flagstones, digging with her nails. She rubbed the dirt between her fingers, and on her leg.
Pure earth. Pure earth.
Outside the lorong , which had no streetlights, she knew the dark lost its surrounding softness, its hugeness, and let itself be broken up and moved back like the dark in any city. Here, in the fuller dark, Johnâs white shirt swelled like cloth in water as he unfastened the gate. In a disconnected piece of her life she had climbed the steep streets of a coastal town after a tidal wave. She remembered being shown the jellyfish swirling along the esplanade or left glued to walls, as she walked at night exalted and calm from digging out a family alive and being kissed and blessed by them, after days of lifting and hauling and counting the dead.
astride
T here was an incident, the summer I worked in the Pentagon. My supervisor vanished.
That summer I didnât know any better than to take the job offered me. I knew nothing. My father worked in the Commerce Department and raised a few Angus in Virginia, in that wide grass circle, not then covered with suburbs, that poured civil servants and in summer their college-age children into the offices of the government. I remember the commute. In the morning you would pass combines and dairy herds and girls up early schooling horses in the wet grass. I was newly appreciative of the green beauty of my state, the Old Dominion, because I had come back to it after being away at college for the first time.
I took a typing test and not long afterward I walked up the steps of the Pentagon. I did that. I have no excuse.
One morning toward the end of that summer my supervisorâs door was standing wide open when I arrived, and all that was left of him was the straight-backed wooden chair he had brought from home. He never came back. He had a high security clearance, though that was downplayed because the official reason given for his disappearance was thwarted passion.
This was early in the sixties, in the days before anyone came to levitate the Pentagon. Certainly no one had attacked it. Its enchantment was internal and impervious. Whatever else has changed since then, I know the vast building must still be filled, despite the throngs inside it, with the same cathedral air, of hushed, guarded, exquisite knowledge. No photograph really shows it as the massive thing it is, a stone wheel covered with portholes, an inhabited wheel, spun down into Virginia swampland and fallen on its side, to be cordoned and protected forever.
It was a city, with sloping ramp-avenues leading to a vast city square of shops and restaurants, the Concourse. The Concourse had the feeling of a great hotel as well as that of a department store. Dignitaries were led along it, parades marched through it, shoppers crowded the aisles of pottery and books. Other countries may give their generals villas, but surely they are outdone by this bazaar of flowers and souvenirs and cosmetics, of pastries, crystal, and the scented wood of carvings, available to everyone, right in the heart of the fort.
In the seventeen miles of corridor, which radiated in spokes and revolved in concentric rings, pedestrians flowed aside for motorized carts carrying men with brooms and buckets, or sometimes tanned young lieutenants in summer uniform, calmly steering little vehicles among the civilians on foot. Little boys saluted them. There were crowds of children there, headdresses, saris floating. Regular tours came through from schools and embassies.
It was never clear which individuals were not important. Always disputable. A janitor could be going through the wastebaskets on the orders of a foreign government.
Underneath the building was an enormous depot with
She sank down and sat against the wall of the house, making the face of crying but not crying, just passing her hand over the ground at the edge of the flagstones, digging with her nails. She rubbed the dirt between her fingers, and on her leg.
Pure earth. Pure earth.
Outside the lorong , which had no streetlights, she knew the dark lost its surrounding softness, its hugeness, and let itself be broken up and moved back like the dark in any city. Here, in the fuller dark, Johnâs white shirt swelled like cloth in water as he unfastened the gate. In a disconnected piece of her life she had climbed the steep streets of a coastal town after a tidal wave. She remembered being shown the jellyfish swirling along the esplanade or left glued to walls, as she walked at night exalted and calm from digging out a family alive and being kissed and blessed by them, after days of lifting and hauling and counting the dead.
astride
T here was an incident, the summer I worked in the Pentagon. My supervisor vanished.
That summer I didnât know any better than to take the job offered me. I knew nothing. My father worked in the Commerce Department and raised a few Angus in Virginia, in that wide grass circle, not then covered with suburbs, that poured civil servants and in summer their college-age children into the offices of the government. I remember the commute. In the morning you would pass combines and dairy herds and girls up early schooling horses in the wet grass. I was newly appreciative of the green beauty of my state, the Old Dominion, because I had come back to it after being away at college for the first time.
I took a typing test and not long afterward I walked up the steps of the Pentagon. I did that. I have no excuse.
One morning toward the end of that summer my supervisorâs door was standing wide open when I arrived, and all that was left of him was the straight-backed wooden chair he had brought from home. He never came back. He had a high security clearance, though that was downplayed because the official reason given for his disappearance was thwarted passion.
This was early in the sixties, in the days before anyone came to levitate the Pentagon. Certainly no one had attacked it. Its enchantment was internal and impervious. Whatever else has changed since then, I know the vast building must still be filled, despite the throngs inside it, with the same cathedral air, of hushed, guarded, exquisite knowledge. No photograph really shows it as the massive thing it is, a stone wheel covered with portholes, an inhabited wheel, spun down into Virginia swampland and fallen on its side, to be cordoned and protected forever.
It was a city, with sloping ramp-avenues leading to a vast city square of shops and restaurants, the Concourse. The Concourse had the feeling of a great hotel as well as that of a department store. Dignitaries were led along it, parades marched through it, shoppers crowded the aisles of pottery and books. Other countries may give their generals villas, but surely they are outdone by this bazaar of flowers and souvenirs and cosmetics, of pastries, crystal, and the scented wood of carvings, available to everyone, right in the heart of the fort.
In the seventeen miles of corridor, which radiated in spokes and revolved in concentric rings, pedestrians flowed aside for motorized carts carrying men with brooms and buckets, or sometimes tanned young lieutenants in summer uniform, calmly steering little vehicles among the civilians on foot. Little boys saluted them. There were crowds of children there, headdresses, saris floating. Regular tours came through from schools and embassies.
It was never clear which individuals were not important. Always disputable. A janitor could be going through the wastebaskets on the orders of a foreign government.
Underneath the building was an enormous depot with
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